Lost
by MouseyL
Summary: Five years of waiting may be over as a case involving one of the team comes a step closer to being solved. How is Elliot coping with his loss?
1. Chapter 1 Waiting

Chapter One - Waiting

Elliot sat watching his son play basketball in the back yard with his friends, Maureen keeping an eye on them. Today was one of the days he couldn't believe how big he had got. How many years it had been since he had seen him for the first time, held in Kathy's arms. What had changed since then.

He was six now. Six years old and in school. Reading, writing, growing up. Calling him Dad instead of Daddy. When did that happen? When did he stop being a baby or a toddler and turned into a boy? Elliot couldn't even remember.

He sighed, and looked down at the coffee growing cold in front of him, the scent still lingering but not appealing to him. Considering downing the lukewarm liquid in one for the caffeine buzz, he picked up the mug but just then, Kathy came into the room.

"Elliot..." she said, and something in her voice made his stomach drop to the floor as he looked at her. "Its Don. He's here. He wants to speak to you." Elliot took a deep breath, and stood up.

"Did he say anything else?" He knew he was stalling as he glanced back out of the window at Eli again. What he wouldn't give to be able to forget his problems in a game of basketball. Kathy shook her head.

"No. He's in the front room." Elliot walked past her, and she resisted the urge to put her hand on his shoulder. She knew he wouldn't even bother to shrug it off, but just carry on walking as if she hardly existed. Watching him leave, she sighed. Perhaps this time, it would be news. Perhaps this time, their wait would be over.

"Captain." Elliot walked into the room with his hand outstretched. The older man stood and shook hands, squeezing it slightly before sitting back down.

"Elliot. How are you?" His eyes were concerned, and although he could hardly bear to see that worry within them, Elliot met his look, searching for any sign of what was coming.

"I'm good. But....you didn't come out here to ask me how I am." Don nodded in understanding. He could see Elliot wanted him to come out with it, but he still didn't know how to say the words.

"No, you're right. I didn't. They........" he suddenly found that his voice was catching, and he watched as the younger man's face fell before his eyes. "They......" he broke off as Elliot choked, and then spoke, his own voice harsh with emotion.

"They found her, didn't they." His eyes were pleading as they looked at his old boss, but even he wasn't sure what they were pleading for. Did he want the affirmative or the negative? Did he want to stop hoping? Did he want to know for certain, one way or another?

"No," Don said. "But they found him."

Elliot let go of the breath he had been holding. So long, and he had finally shown up.

"Where? When?"

"Just outside DuBois, PA. His car went off the road last night, seems he fell asleep. The I.D they found on him was fake, the car was stolen four years ago and he was unconscious so they ran his DNA to try and get an identity. It came up as a match."

They sat in silence for a minute as Elliot absorbed this information. Finally, the elusive man they had been searching for for so long. That 'John Doe'. And he had been found because of pure, unadulterated luck.

"Are they bringing him in?" he asked. Don nodded.

"Yeah. Fin went to pick him up personally. Its been.........5 hrs since he set out. They should be on their way back by now."

Elliot stood up suddenly, turning to look out of the window and running his hand down his face. For a second he considered yelling at Don for the time it had taken for him to come round and tell him. Five hours at least since they'd known, almost certainly a lot longer, and he was only just finding out. Even Fin had known before him. However, hearing the faint sounds of children's laughter in the background, he took a deep breath, and looked at his ex-captain again.

"I want to be there. When he's questioned." Elliot's voice came out more aggressive than he intended, but he saw nothing but understanding in Don's eyes. His head was swirling and he was feeling sick to his stomach, but he knew that he wanted to see the man.

"You can watch. But you won't be allowed in to speak to him. I can't let anything jeopardise this Elliot. And with your temper......."

Surprisingly, Elliot didn't mind. He understood where Don was coming from. It had been too long, and yet he knew that he would never be able to control himself if he was put in the same room as that guy. His fists bunched up even thinking about it.

"Lets go then." Don nodded and stood up, walking out of the room in front of Elliot who grabbed a coat from the hallway as he passed. Kathy saw them from the kitchen, and came up the hall as Elliot shrugged it on.

"Its to do with her, isn't it?" she said, concern showing throughout her face and body as she looked between them both. Don nodded,

"Yeah. We've got a possible lead." he said, stepping one pace closer to the door.

"OK."

"I don't know when......." Elliot mumbled, looking at her but not quite seeing her as he let the sentence trail away.

"I know. Just......call me if.........if you know anything for certain. We'll be here when you get back." She reached out and squeezed his hand. For a second he squeezed back, and then he was gone, the door shutting behind him.

Kathy leant against the wall, listening to the sound of Eli and his friends still playing. She didn't know when he'd be back, when she'd get a call one way or another. But she knew what waiting felt like. She'd been doing it for so long already.

The two men were silent as they drove into the city, each caught up in their own thoughts, not even music from the radio breaking the stillness of the air. Elliot barely noticed the streets going past, didn't register the route he had taken for so many years, the differences that had appeared since the last time he ventured into the city. It wasn't until they pulled up outside the precinct that he was jolted out of his reverie and got out of the car.

Walking into the squad room with Cragen, it was almost as if he had never left. As if the years hadn't passed. He looked around, not seeing the different names on the lockers, the different photos on the desks, instead still seeing her coat slung over the back of her chair, her dark head looking up to meet him as he walked in the door.

"Elliot, this is Captain Price." Don said, touching Elliot's arm slightly to get his attention. Elliot came too and offered his hand towards the woman.

"It's good to meet you Detective Stabler. Although, I wish it could be in better circumstances." Her voice was surprisingly warm and her handshake firm but comforting.

"Thank you. Me too." He took her in for a second, the fading blonde hair swept back into a bun, the sharp suit, the air of authority she carried. This wasn't someone to be messed with, and yet he could sense a softer side as she looked at him, as if she really cared for the job and what she was faced with.

"Don, I've just got a couple of things I need to run by you," she said, glancing at him and then looking back at Elliot. "Please, make yourself back at home. They won't be here for a few hours yet."

He nodded, and watched as they walked into the Captain's office before moving further into the room distractedly. For something to do, he poured himself a coffee and sipped it, leaning back against the side and letting his mind wander. Suddenly, it really was five years ago again.

_He looked up as she sighed and threw her pen down on the case files she had been looking through, brushing her hand through her hair and leaning back to look at him._

"_You should call it a night," he said, pausing for a minute to assess her red eyes and the dark circles underneath them._

"_I'm not done yet," she replied, putting her arms down onto the desk and picking the pen back up again. "I just...maybe I need another coffee." He stood and picked her almost empty coffee up, walking over to the machine and pouring the thick black sludge into two mugs, grimacing slightly at its strength . _

_Watching her for a second, he smiled at how quickly she immersed herself back into the files. He could tell she was distracted though, she kept clicking and unclicking the pen as she read, and rubbing her spare hand round the back of her neck._

"_Here." He put the coffee down in front of her and sat against her desk, wrapping his hands around the warm china._

"_Thanks." She picked up the mug and took a sip, pulling a face as she swallowed. "God, __how long since that was made." He smiled._

"_Hey, it could be worse, Munch could have made it." _

"_True." She turned another page and then looked up at him as he carried on looking at her. _

_"What?" _

"_You look like crap," He said, drinking his own coffee. She smiled, and snorted as she ran her eyes up and down him._

"_You're hardly looking your best yourself," Their eyes met for a second, and both acknowledged the concern for each other, and the exhaustion they were both feeling. _

_"Maybe you're right. I could do with at least a few hours." She closed the file and put it to the side, standing up and pulling her coat from the back of the chair. "You going home too?" _

_He shook his head. _

"_Nah. I'll wake Eli up if I come in this late, and then none of us will get any sleep. I'll just crash in the crib." She nodded and picked up her bag, slinging it over her shoulder._

_  
"OK. See you bright and early." _

_  
"Bring better coffee!" He called after her as he watched her walking towards the elevators, and she looked over her shoulder, smiling at him before disappearing._

A shout from the corridor brought Elliot back to the present and he blinked a couple of times, trying to clear the images from his head. He looked around him but apart from a couple of people dotting in and out of the room he was still alone.

Barely able to resist the urge to go and sit down at his old desk, to start working on a case, to do something, his eyes rested on a file sitting on the desk nearest him. Munch's old desk. It was open and there, looking back at him with dark eyes and hair swept back, was Olivia's face.


	2. Chapter 2 Missing

**A/N - **Again, I own nothing etc etc. And thank you for reading, and reviewing if you feel so inclined.

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Chapter 2 - Missing

Elliot couldn't stop himself. Sitting down, he pulled the file towards him, his thumb touching her face for a second and resting by the corner of her mouth.

He wanted to look at her forever, hold her in his mind, and yet the Olivia he kept in his thoughts and memories seemed to have little resemblance to the picture that he had seen so often since that day.

There was no reason to go through this, or even to want to. To see the words in black and white, yet the sudden urge to read every detail of the case again was intense and suffocating. Despite an inner knowledge that this would do no good to his mental state, his eyes were drawn to the pages.

Flicking through, the tightening of his chest only got worse, his heartbeat resonating loud as drumbeats within his ears, and the blood rushing throughout his body. Almost without meaning too, the word escaped from his mouth, forced out by the emotions and ache building within.

"Liv."

And then he was there. That morning.

_He wakes early despite his exhaustion, his body complaining at having slept on the hard bed in the crib. Staring at the springs of the bunk above his head for a few minutes, he clears his head of dreams and sleep and then swings his legs out, stretching and yawning._

_Glancing at his watch, he sees that it's just past 7.30am and while he'd rather have another half hour, he knows that he'd never get back to sleep. Pulling on his shirt, he walks downstairs and finds Fin already in, standing in front of the board. _

_It's another day, another case, except this one they seem to be going nowhere with. There is a picture of a body, a Caucasian boy of about twelve who was found in a dumpster down an alley by a homeless woman. They have no ID, no name, no parents, just the signs of sexual and physical abuse that scatter his skin. Elliot looks for a minute, reabsorbing the facts before speaking. _

"_You come up with any bright ideas overnight?" _

_Fin shakes his head, and Elliot walks over to the coffee machine. Thankfully Fin has already started a new pot and he pours the dark liquid out for both of them. Fin walks to his desk and sits down, still staring at the board, and after a few sips of the life-giving drink, Elliot does the same. _

_Pulling out his phone, he writes a text._

"_To: Olivia_

_Bring breakfast when you come in. We're wasting away here."_

_A smile flits across his face for a spilt second at the thought of her expression when she reads it, the roll of her eyes at the idea of either he or Fin becoming remotely skeletal, then he puts it back in his pocket and starts throwing ideas back and forward about the boy._

_Slowly everyone else filters in, Munch espousing loudly about the unfairness of the latest political scandal as he drops the morning paper on his desk and Cragen stepping out of his office to fill his own mug up before turning to them all. _

"_Where's Liv?" he asks, aiming his question at Elliot, but everyone glances at her desk. Elliot looks at his watch and sees it has been over an hour since he sent the text. It's now 8.45am and past the time she would usually be in, even when there isn't an ongoing child murder case. _

"_Maybe she stopped for coffee and breakfast?" He shrugs, and Fin snorts loudly. _

"_Yeah, you know what she's like if she suspects my partner might have had anything to do with the coffee." Munch looks suitably indignant and raises his hands in innocence. _

"_I haven't touched that machine for three days. Not since she threw the jar at my head. I'm worried her aim will start getting better." _

_They all smile wryly before Cragen starts giving out tasks for the day. _

"_Elliot, give her a call and pick her up wherever she is. Warner called, she wants you to meet her at the lab. Fin, Munch, start re-canvassing the area with this boy's photo. I want a name by lunchtime."_

_All three men nod, Elliot picking his jacket up from the back of his chair and pulling it on before speed dialling Olivia's number. Walking out, he waits to hear her voice at the end of the line but frowns slightly as her voicemail kicks in. Dialling again, he gets the same result. _

_Twenty minutes, six unanswered calls to her cell and three to her home later, he stands in front of her building, pressing the buzzer to her apartment. So far, no one has come out to let him in, and he's just considering buzzing the super when his phone rings. Hoping its her, he's disappointed to see it's Cragen. _

"_Hey." _

"_You get hold of Liv yet?" _

"_No. I'm outside her building now. No answer on either her home or cell." As he speaks he looks up and down the block as if willing her to walk round the corner. _

"_Think she's sick?" _

"_She seemed fine when she left last night," he says, as behind him he hears someone coming out of the building. Diving for the door, the woman holds it open for him to enter. "Hang on, I'm in. I'm going up now."_

"_OK. Call me when you get hold of her." Cragen says before hanging up._

_Elliot walks up the stairs and down the hall to her door, thinking of what excuse he will give for worrying and harassing her phones and now her apartment. Knocking, he hears no movement on the other side and, after a minute, knocks again._

"_Liv? It's me. You in there?" He waits for another few seconds but there is nothing. Taking his cell out, he calls hers again, leaning in against the door to listen. He can definitely hear the faint sound of it ringing somewhere inside. He knocks harder, the worry growing. _

"_Liv? Open up will you?" Still no response. Reaching out and trying the door, he is surprised when he feels it open. _

"_It's me. You here?" He calls as he pushes it open and takes one step inside. There is silence, but his heart leaps to his throat as if he had heard her scream. The scene in front of him is one he has seen before, but out of place in his partner's apartment._

_The kitchen table lies on its side, a lamp smashed on the floor by the sofa and cushions scattered everywhere. _

_He moves through the room and now not only is his heart in his throat but it is beating faster and faster as if he is sprinting, in the middle of a chase. He calls her name again before pushing the door to her bedroom open and stepping in. The bed is made and there is no sign of anything wrong here. The bathroom door is closed and, even though he knows in his heart that the place is deserted and he won't hear her call out to come in or go away, he knocks before opening it. _

_It's empty, and the faint hope that it would turn out she had been puking all night and couldn't even leave the bathroom is gone. _

_Stepping back into the living area, he pulls out his cell phone and calls Cragen._

"_Captain? She's not here. But......." and as he's speaking, his gaze sees something in the kitchen that almost causes him to drop the phone. Stepping closer, he can faintly hear Cragen calling his name but ignores it, all his attention focused on one spot on the edge of the kitchen surface._

_There's blood._

_Looking down, he sees a small patch on the floor directly beneath the first, and he finds himself stepping backwards in horror, away from the dark red stain, away from the sickening truth that until now he has been pushing to the back of his mind. Something is wrong. Very wrong. _

_Cragen is almost shouting his name now and he blinks, raising the phone back to his ear. _

"_Something's...... there's.......there's......," he can barely speak and yet the logical part of his brain is beginning to take control, "there's blood here. And the place is a mess. Get a unit and CSU here. Now." _

_With the last statement, he swallows his emotions and his cop brain steps into the breach, although he's not sure that this isn't just a bad dream. He hears Cragen confirm he is on his way, and is calling in the troops, and he knows he should start to do something, look for more evidence, call around hospitals, anything, but he can't. _

_He is still staring in disbelief at the scene before him when he catches sight of her cell phone, half hidden by the fallen table. Reaching for it, he finds that he has pulled a glove out of his pocket subconsciously, and the thought that he is treating Olivia's apartment as a crime scene would derail him if he dared to think about it. _

_Instead he acts on instinct and makes sure he doesn't let his skin touch its surface as he flips it open. The screen shows his text and his missed calls and, scrolling through its call log, he sees there has been no activity since the previous day. _

_It seems only a few seconds since he raised the alarm before he looks up and sees two uniforms standing at the door, waiting for instructions. He gruffly tells them to start canvassing the building, but when they ask for a photo to take round, he can't bring himself to remove the picture of her and her mother from the frame on the side table in the living area. It's too old anyway. Instead, he tells them to call their precinct and get copies of the photo from her NYPD file. _

_They step away, and he hears them begin the arduous task of knocking on doors. The world feels more and more surreal and now time has stopped, turning the minutes into hours before the Captain finally appears a few feet away. _

"_Elliot."_

_There is an unknown quality to his voice as he walks in and looks around. Elliot shakes his head slightly as if to clear it from this nightmare that he's trapped in, and his 'cop' voice takes over before he can think._

"_This is how it was when I got here. The door was unlocked. And her cell phone was on the floor, down there," he gestures, and then takes one step towards the corner of the surface where the dark stain is. Without speaking, Cragen looks for a second before they both turn away._

"_CSU team are on their way," the Captain says, "and the alert of a missing police officer has gone out to all units." The words sound calm and normal and yet Elliot can tell he too is struggling to comprehend these phrases within the context of Olivia. "What about her gun, her badge, her wallet?"_

"_I haven't seen her gun or badge but...." Elliot glances toward the bookcase where he knows she puts her bag as she walks in and, sure enough, it is there. Putting on the glove he is still holding, he unzips it carefully and pulls out her wallet. "There's $30, two credit cards....doesn't look like anything is missing."_

"_So, no burglary," Cragen says simply. _

"_No." _

_And now Munch and Fin are at the door and this is becoming scarily real. They aren't often all at a crime scene together but something's missing and he takes him a second to realise that that thing is Olivia. She's not here, and she's missing and now they're going to be searching for her, and there is blood and destruction and it's all too much._

_Faintly he hears Cragen telling the other two detectives to start calling hospitals and, god forbid, the morgue, for Jane Does. It's that word, the morgue, that finally undoes him. _

"_Elliot. Elliot, sit down," There is a voice nearby, and a hand on his shoulder, pushing him down onto a chair and shaking him slightly. "You ok?" It's his Captain and yet it's not. There is too much worry in his tone and a gentleness, as if he's scared that Elliot will break. He might. _

_He has no idea how long he sits there before he opens his eyes and sees the CSU team walking in. He cannot bear it. To be here while they do their thing. Standing and pushing blindly through everyone, he almost runs down the stairs and out onto the street, stepping past the cop on the door and leaning on the wall to one side. He presses his hands against the coolness of it, trying to swallow the sickness that is threatening to take over, and he's saying her name under his breath with every beat of his heart._

"_Liv. Liv. Where are you?"_

Elliot jerked back to reality with the echo of her name still in his mind, and took a deep breath, letting the present world filter in. His hand was wrapped round the half drunk coffee and he was surprised to find it still warm beneath his skin. It felt as if the whole day must have passed already while he was trapped in his memories.

Glancing at his watch, he saw that the coffee told no lies, and not much time had gone by at all. It would still be a few hours before the nemesis he had never even put name or face too would arrive, and he knew that for his own sanity, or insanity, he would have to go through the rest of Olivia's file, but his mind was still spinning from the intensity of his flashback and he needed a few minutes.

Putting it to one side, he saw that there were three other files underneath and he knew what they would be. The other, scant pieces to the puzzle they had never solved. The three women that were now inextricably linked to Olivia, and had been for the last five years. The three women that the DNA said had been raped in their apartments by the man Fin was bringing in now.

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Thank you for reading if you've made it this far. Much appreciated.


	3. Chapter 3 Connecting

**A/N - I own nothing. **

**Please review or give comments, it really helps with motivation. Thank you. **

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**Chapter Three - Connecting**

He opened the top file and his resolve faltered before he had even begun, seeing Olivia's familiar scrawl across the bottom of one of the reports. But he took a deep breath and muttered at himself to get a grip. It was only going to get worse from here, and if he fell apart now then he'd never see this through.

There was all the usual information: victim's name, address, report of the attack and photos of her injuries. He could sit and read the statement, stick to the simplicity of black and white words without emotions, but it was both easier and more difficult to sink again into his memories. Easier because she would be within them, he could reach out and almost touch her, see her, hear her. More difficult for precisely that reason.

He took a deep breath and started reading, knowing that his mind would take over and twist the words into vivid memories. Really, he had no choice in the matter at all.

"_It was an ordinary middle-of-the-night call. His cell had shrieked at him to wake up at just past 1a.m and both his body and mind confirmed that he hadn't been asleep long. The conversation was short, if not sweet, and he slipped from the bed carefully, not wanting to wake his sleeping wife. She would only utter that sigh, the one that showed her impatience at their night being broken again, as if it were his fault there had been another victim created. It was simpler if she just slept._

_Thirty minutes later he was pulling up outside an apartment building, barely taking in the standard flashing lights of squad cars and an ambulance, and the normal sight of a uniform taking a statement from a man. He walked into the lobby and was directed up one flight of stairs. When he rounded the corner at the top he saw Olivia, her messily pulled back hair highlighting the fact that they should both be in bed, and as she saw him coming she cut off her conversation with another officer and stepped towards him._

"_What now?" While his question would have sounded harsh to any other person, he could see only understanding in her eyes. The frustration of yet another crime, the resignation that it happened at night and the knowledge that these scenes would never come to an end._

"_Twenty three year old Laura Hayden, came home from a night with friends and was ambushed by a guy in her apartment, hiding behind the front door." She glanced down at her notebook for a second. "Seems he held a knife to her throat and then raped her. First on scene couldn't get much more out of her. She's being seen by an EMT now."_

_Elliot nodded and stepped towards the open door to the apartment, looking down as he did so._

"_No damage to the lock," he stated to no one in particular. _

_Olivia stepped past him and into the main living area, the kitchenette to one side and an open window straight ahead of them, facing the door. She gestured to it. _

"_Seems he got in from the fire escape. Only took one blow to the lock to break it enough to open the window." _

_Moving towards the girl sitting on her sofa, Olivia took the lead and introduced them as Elliot swept his eyes across the rest of the apartment. There was a small smear of blood on the floor about eight feet inside the door but, other than that and the window, there were no other signs of an attack. _

_As Olivia pulled out a pen and began listening to the girl, Laura, tell her story, he moved closer to hear it for himself._

"_I got home about 11pm I guess. I'd been with some friends, we go to the movies every week, it's a standing date."_

_He watched her as she began to talk, assessing her body language and attitude. It wasn't that he automatically disbelieved a victim, it couldn't be further from the truth, but there were signals that could often reveal more than the words said. _

"_Did you notice anything odd before you came into the apartment?"_

_She shook her head, long dark hair falling slightly in front of her face before she pushed it back and looked at Olivia._

"_No, nothing."_

"_Did you hear anything unusual?"_

_A repeat of the shake, and the falling of the hair. _

"_Okay, what happened next?" Olivia leant forward, almost imperceptibly, as if to offer support, or make sure she didn't miss anything. Probably both, and Elliot doubted Laura was even aware, but he was so used to his partner, he knew her ways. The girl took a deep breath and began, her voice shaking slightly already._

"_I unlocked the door and tried to turn the light on but nothing happened. I figured the bulb had blown or something. The door shut behind me, and then I heard something. It was hardly anything, not enough to make me jump or anything, and I went to move but suddenly there was a hand over my mouth and something digging in my throat."_

"_Was he wearing gloves?" Elliot asked, and she looked at him for the first time, but without meeting his eyes, before staring back down at her hands. _

"_Yeah. Wool I think. And a dark colour, blue or black." He nodded, and she took another breath._

"_It happened so fast. He....he said he had a knife and he wasn't afraid to use it. I tried to move a bit and he pushed it harder and cut me. Just.....a little cut, but then he kissed it." Her fingers touched the small red line on her neck and she shivered slightly at the thought. "He said he didn't want to kill me but he would if I gave him trouble." _

_She swallowed, and a tear drifted from the corner of her eye, tracing her skin before Olivia pulled a tissue from her pocket and handed it over. Elliot looked at the floor, not wanting to intrude on her trauma more than he could manage. _

"_I told him to take what he wanted. My wallet, my laptop, my jewellery, anything. He gave this laugh, and said that wasn't what he had come for."_

_She had already started tearing the tissue up, pulling little pieces off and letting them drop to the floor as snowflakes. _

"_He told me to get down on the floor, on my stomach, with my arms reaching above my head. When I lay down, he got on top of me, the knife pressing against my throat again. He pulls my pants down so hard I heard them rip. Then he pulled my panties down and put his knee between my legs. I tried to kick him but he slammed my head against the floor. Hard enough to draw blood. And then he.......he....."_

_Her words had been getting faster and faster as she recounted the events, as if speed would make it all be over sooner, and remove some of the impact of what happened. They both give her silence for a second before Elliot fills the gap._

"_He raped you."_

_She nodded, not looking up at all, her shoulders curling in towards her. _

"_Yes. The knife was still at my throat and every time he moved it scratched me." She distractedly touched her neck again. _

"_He was so heavy, I could hardly breathe." As she neared the end of her story, her voice was getting dimmer, the energy and life draining out of her like the air from her lungs. _

_It was with a note of disbelief that she continued, "it didn't take very long. When he started I.....I thought it would last forever, but it didn't." She shrugged slightly and sighed._

"_Then he got off, and told me to close my eyes. He said he'd kill me if I looked. I tried too, out of the corner of my eye, without him seeing, but it was so dark. He went to the door and opened it, and then he left." She straightened up as she finished, and looked at Olivia who had been making small, discrete notes. _

_There was an appeal in her voice, a child to an adult, looking for confirmation or understanding about her actions as she spoke again. _

"_I didn't know what to do. I guess I just lay there for a few minutes before I could move. Then I called 911."_

"_You did great," Olivia reassured, resting her hand on Laura's knee for a second before looking back down to her notes and resuming the questions. _

"_Could you tell how big he was?"_

_She considered for a second, and Elliot saw it looked easier for her now it was down to the details instead of the emotions and overall experience. _

"_Taller than me. Maybe, a head taller? I'm 5'5". I guess perhaps 6ft or so." Olivia nodded. _

"_And what about his build?"_

"_Not......big like, fat. But he was really strong. And heavy." Elliot shifted slightly, and asked, _

"_What about his voice? Did you recognise him?" _

_She looked up at him, shock flashing over her pale, tear-stained face at the thought of someone who knew her being able to do that, before the numb and exhausted mask returned._

"_No. I didn't."_

"_And did he has an accent?" She shook her head without speaking. Olivia could see her tiring, and softened her voice. _

"_Did he have a smell?" _

_Laura looked like she was going to burst into tears, biting her bottom lip and holding her breath before her eyes flickered round the room and settled again toward the floor._

"_Umm.......his breath smelt of mint. Like he'd been chewing gum, or brushed his teeth. Other than that, he just smelt...........like a guy." The shrug was there again, punctuating her statement, and she rubbed her face with her hand. Elliot could see the tiredness creeping further and further up on her._

"_We're nearly done with the questions. Just a couple more. Have you had any trouble recently? Split up with a boyfriend?" Even though she said she didn't recognise him or the voice, it was another one of those things he had to ask._

_"No, I'm single at the moment. My ex moved to Europe about 2 months ago and I haven't been seeing anyone." Possibly at the thought of her boyfriend, or the fact she hadn't got one, the tears started flowing faster and her body began to shake. The shock was beginning to wear off, and the pain had begun._

_Olivia shifter further forward on the coffee table she was perched on, after putting the pad in her pocket. _

"_Okay, you're going to go to hospital now to get checked over, and they'll run a rape kit to look for evidence. I'll be with you the whole time, alright?" Laura nodded and began to stand up, her hand reaching for Olivia's as she put her arm around the wobbly girl's back. _

_When they started to walk out of the apartment, Elliot went over to the officer at the door. _

"_Initial canvass get anything?" He asked, but the other man shook his head. _

"_No. Nobody saw a guy, no one heard anything, and there are no security cameras in the building."_

_Elliot sighed. Unless it was an acquaintance rape, which looked unlikely, or the rapist had handily left DNA or fingerprints and was in the system, this seemed as though it was going to be one of those cases where they didn't catch a break. _

Now, looking back, he remembered different things about that case. Olivia's hair slipping slightly from its band throughout the whole interview; the journey to the precinct in silence, both so used to one another that no words were needed; the sight of her expression when he stopped for coffee and handed it to her.

In the car, all that hung in the air was the quiet recognition of never expressed despair, numbed by years and the harsh practicalities of the job but existing in tiny shards nonetheless. Always there was this, sometimes just for a second and other for minutes or hours, before life and the cop voice kicked in and emotions were expunged, or ignored.

Elliot rubbed his hand down his face and realised that this part of the continuing ordeal was over, for the minute. The file and the two below were ones at which he had looked over more times than he could think, still searching for clues, and he dreaded being forced to go through them yet again.

But, at the same time, he feared not doing so. It would mean the end, and the answers. Even though answers was what they have all been continually seeking, faced with the possibility, ignorance began to seem more and more appealing.

He skimmed the rest of the file, and the two under it. Two other names: Kirsty More and Joanna Lister, with statements to match their first victim's, and the dates of the crimes coming ten and sixteen days after the first. The only difference was the point of entry, the perp had picked the locks of the other two, but all else showed it was the same guy. And, at the end, the final kick in the guts that meant these rape victims were more connected to Olivia than he could ever have imagined.

A sheet of paper with DNA results, matching all three of the victims to each other and the single perp.

He didn't want what was about to happen, and he fought it for a few deep gasps of breath as his fingers dug into the desk. But, inevitably, he lost, and he saw Melinda walking through the door to the precinct, the darkness of night of that first, terrible day following her in, causing the crowded room to hush as she looked towards Elliot and the other detectives.

_She held out a file, but began speaking before Cragen could even open it. _

"_I put a rush on the blood found in Olivia's apartment. I compared the sample to hair from her hairbrush. The blood on the counter and the floor beneath is a match to hers." _

_Elliot vaguely heard a gasp, the murmur of voices from the outskirts of the room, and the silence of those standing by him. He could feel it, the oppressiveness as the information settled around them, enveloping them. Behind him he was aware of Fin punching his desk, but he didn't move. Melinda twisted her hands together in worry and trepidation, before speaking again._

"_There's more," she said, taking a a deep breath. "There were small blood spots found on the other side of the kitchen, toward the living area. They weren't Olivia's."_

_Elliot was too numb, too lost to speak, but Cragen did._

_  
"Do we know whose it is?" His voice came out sharp, probably sharper than he intended but Melinda didn't appear to react, looking him straight in the eye as she answered._

"_It's a match to the semen found in Laura Hayden, Kirsty More and Joanna Lister." And as they stared at her, fear roared in Elliot's head, loud as a building falling around him, waves overpowering him and dragging him under."_

Sitting at the desk, at Munch's old desk, he could still hear that sound beneath his thoughts. The noise that had overpowered him the moment hope began to die.

* * *

_**Again - not begging but reviews/criticisms/comments are appreciated and much valued. **_


	4. Chapter 4 Pretending

Actually, Elliot knew he was deluding himself. He was trying to deceive himself, even now, into thinking that he had been stronger. To pretend that he had kept the faith for longer, that he hadn't allowed the treacherous thoughts born of fear and worry to intrude until they had some facts that confirmed for definite what had probably happened. He was lying to himself, still.

Everyone had done so though, during that day, until the dark night of reality set in. The old, bitter cliché of 'no news is good news' had circulated between all involved. Bitter because the words had rolled off their tongues far more often than they had believed in them. A white lie designed to keep them held together for as long as possible, while none of them were brave enough to say that they were breaking apart.

The truth was that his hope had begun to fade as soon as he had seen the blood and the overturned table; the moment he had made the fateful call that turned Olivia's home into a crime scene and her name into a missing person.

He hated himself for it for a long time afterwards, when he was forced to face how quickly his mind had jumped to the tragic, the heartbreaking, the devastating. How he had let Olivia down in allowing himself to doubt, even for a minute, her abilities, her courage and her strength. He should have held it together for far longer than he did.

Sitting in the doubtful, confusing peace of the familiar squad room, nausea rose to his throat, provoked by self hatred, and mimicking the bile that had burnt his mouth as he had stood outside her apartment building, with the bright yellow tape flickering and dancing in the corner of his eye.

"_He spits the sour, stinging stomach acid onto the floor beside him and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. Gulping the air in an attempt to ground himself, he sees Cragen step out of the building and come towards him. With a shrug of his shoulders, the cop persona falls over him, settling his emotions and allowing himself to become temporarily detached. _

"_How you doing?" the Captain asks, and Elliot can see that he is struggling not to put an arm on his shoulder in comfort. He's glad that Cragen doesn't though, he needs to pretend for a minute that this is just another case, so he deflects the personal and turns to the professional._

_  
"Where are we so far?" His voice isn't as solid as he would like, but it's a start._

"_One of the neighbours, a Mrs Blake, heard a noise at about 9pm. She says it sounded like a chair falling over, but she heard nothing before or after, and didn't look out or investigate further." _

_Elliot nods._

" _Liv left the precinct at around 8.30pm, so that would fit as a timeline for her to have got home then." Cragen makes a note on his pad, and Elliot feels odd, standing on the other side of a cop taking notes. He isn't a witness and he isn't a victim. Nor is she. But is that true any more?_

"_I need you to go back to the precinct and start calling the hospitals for any Jane Does admitted or treated from 8.30pm last night, up until now. And.....check with Warner as well."_

_Elliot feels himself pale slightly at the last words, a flash of fear before he composes his face again. _

"_Will do." Without asking further questions he walks towards the sanctuary of his car, desperate to get away from the building as if he could leave the events behind as well._

_Just as he pulls up at the precinct, he catches sight of a scarf on the floor of the passenger side, and gulps. It's hers. He can't bring himself to touch it, and so it lies curled round itself like a sleeping animal. A cat maybe. Or...a dead animal. He knows that if he picks it up, it will smell of her._

_Without giving it another look, he gets out and dashes in, refusing to make eye contact with anyone as he makes his way to the squad room._

_Sitting at his desk, he pulls the phone towards him while carefully avoiding looking at Olivia's side. To look up and see the space is yet another acknowledgement._

_Immersing himself in the calls to hospitals and clinics, he has two flashes of hope before further digging reveals them to not be her: a tattoo on an ankle and a pair of green eyes eliminating the two unknown brunettes from his enquiries. He saves Melinda till last, knowing that she would call if Olivia was laid out, cold and bare on a metal slab, and yet fearing the vision as truth._

"_Medical examiner's office," breaks through his nightmare image and he asks for Dr. Warner, telling the voice on the other end that yes, it is urgent and no, it won't wait. He taps his pen against the desk for the few seconds of silence, and then she is on the other end._

"_Hey, it's Elliot." _

"_What can I do for you? I haven't got a case of yours at the moment have I?"_

"_No."_

_He doesn't know how to phrase the question, how to blurt out that Olivia is gone and possibly dead somewhere, but he has too. _

"_Olivia's missing. Since this morning. And we had to check......" he allows his voice to trail into nothing, his tongue refusing to form the words 'body' or 'dead'. M_

"_My god. I hadn't heard," Elliot can feel the shock radiating through the phone, and is glad they aren't standing face to face. "She's not here Elliot. I....I'd have called you if she...." _

"_I know," he says, cutting her off, "but we had to ask. I guess CSU will be getting back with evidence from her place soon....maybe you could do the analysis....there was.........blood." _

_The word sits like a weight between them before she murmurs that of course she will, and then there doesn't seem to be anything else to say. She knows nothing yet and there is no time or energy for sympathy or worry to be passed between them._

"_We'll let you know if we know something." He says, and she says she will do the same, and he can faintly hear her goodbye as he puts the phone down and sighs. That's all the places called where she could have ended up and it be an accident, and now there is an almost excruciating desire to get up and run, to hunt, to find. He wants to be a sniffer dog._

_Looking up, he immediately sees the board in front of him, and stares stunned for a few seconds longer than he wants to spare. Someone has put her photo up there, 'Missing' written in block capitals above it and a time-line below. They've also printed a still from the security camera outside the precinct, a blurry outline of her back moving away from the building, with the date and time-stamp clearly visible. He can tell in a glance where she is in the picture, without the need for the circle highlighting her._

_An incredible urge swells, coursing through his veins, and he takes a step forward to rip her photo off and tear it into pieces, wipe the writing away, smash everything in the room, because they're wrong. But before he can act, can lose it, there is the sound of high heels behind him and a demanding voice._

_  
"Why didn't anyone call me?" He spins to see Alex striding towards him, anger radiating through every step. Before he can help it, he turns on her. _

"_Because we're too busy trying to find her!" and it's the first time he's raised his voice since all this began. She jerks back from him a little, as if his anger has physically pushed her away, or slapped her._

"_I deserved to know via a better way than the grapevine." She's not awed by his irritation and refuses to back down from her position of hurt and indignation. _

"_Well, Olivia deserves to not be missing. And you know now, so it's done," he snaps. He knows he's being unreasonable, the beginnings of strain and worry showing themselves as he takes it out on her, but he continues, "so if you could stop complaining at me and make yourself useful, then we could use your help in going through the convictions to see who threatened her, and who has been paroled recently." _

_He is hoping that this will shut her up and get her off his back. He doesn't want to turn into this person, doesn't want to allow his worst side to show at this time but she's gone, he's trapped in the precinct because he knows Cragen won't trust him out there until he knows which way, or when, he is going to fall, and he is absolutely helpless._

_She is silent, but before she can sit down, pull out files or ask where she should start, he is distracted by two figures over her shoulder, and turns sharply to leave the room, away from the foreboding men in black suits. IAB are coming and he knows he will be in their sights._

_Liv and he have teetered a fine line on more than one occasion, and who better to question over a cop's disappearance than her partner. Especially when everyone believes they've been sleeping together, or have got too close, or that one will be the death of the other._

_Of course, he knows he is innocent but right now he cannot bear the questions. He's already verbally attacked a friend, thrown up, nearly trashed the room and he can't imagine what he will do when they start tearing through her personal life, through their relationship, through their problems. He needs them to himself for a minute. Already today, her apartment has been ripped apart, and even that is too much._

_Running, he escapes to the roof, bursting through the door with such violence that it bounces back and slams before he can take more than two strides through. _

A loud bang startled him back to the present and he looked around sharply. A younger guy in a suit had come into the room and sent a trashcan flying. Now he was on his knees, picking the stuff back up hurriedly. He risked a sheepish glance upwards when he realised Elliot was looking at him, and then rose, seeming as if he was going to dare an approach.

With a clumsy, almost violent movement of his own, Elliot sent his chair crashing into the coffee machine as he stood up, grabbing Olivia's file and walking out of the room without a second glance at the man. As within his memories, he retreated to the roof, surprised to see it was a beautiful day. Weren't days of decision and culmination supposed to be full of power and fury, dangerous lightning, pouring rain or vicious winds? Instead, there was just a gentle breeze and a light sunshine drifting over the rooftops and skyscrapers. An ordinary day.

Walking over to the edge, he placed the closed file beside him and leant against the wall, staring down at the pavement and watching the people, small and insignificant beneath him. Subconsciously, he was standing in almost the exact place he had on 'd-day', the day the world had stopped. Struggling to calm and contain himself in preparation for the IAB's interrogation, he had been ambushed by memories of her.

Now, in the present, it was a relief to sink into the past without the nightmare coating of missing posters and empty spaces, the good memories of her before........well, before the monster built of fear and uncertainty reared its head.

"_That first, dreadful day when he leans against the wall, he presses his knuckles so heavily into the coarse, solid bricks that he draws blood, but even that doesn't stop the initial, soft flashback drawing his mind into a safer, easier place. An escape._

* * *

_It takes him to night time, to the same roof, looking over the same view, except they are both there this time. At first there are no words, just silent breathing as they sift through the facts of the day: a crying child, a grieving father, a woman murdered by her lover when she refused to leave her family. Neither can forget the sight of the four year old boy with blood on his hands and lips from the stab wound in her stomach. When asked, his quiet voice had explained, _

"_Mommy always kisses boo-boos better. So I did. But she won't wake up." _

_Now they were standing in the aftermath, transferring the pain from the surface where all could see and absorbing it into their bodies and their blood, filing the day into the appropriate folders of their mind labelled 'terrible, don't think, don't acknowledge." _

_Their arms are parallel as they lean, and when Elliot looks at her he can see the lights of the city flitting across her face, highlighting the slight blurriness of her eyes that hint at her softer side, the part that made her so good with the boy as they carried him away from the body. She blinks, and instead of tears dripping down her face, she becomes more settled, acceptance of the facts of their world calming her._

_As he turns his back to the city he takes a deep breath at the same time as she does. Pushing off the wall, he takes a step and asks quietly,_

"_You okay?" She nods and looks back out._

"_I just needed a few minutes. I'll come and finish up the paperwork soon." _

_He nods as well, walks further away from the wall, and when he gets to the door he looks back as he opens it. All he can see is her silhouette, but the sight of her as familiar to him as his own within a mirror. More so. He steps inside._

* * *

_It's that memory he is hijacked by on the first day, and when he blinks out of it into the grim oppressiveness of her disappearance, he is overwhelmed by how solid she was in his mind. For a few seconds she is real, and then she begins to fade into the air before him. _

_Steeling himself for whatever was to come, he turns to the door, shutting out all thoughts but the desperate need to find Olivia, and stay calm with the IAB, as he walked through it. _

_Little could he imagine, at that beginning, with that initial flashback, how many times he would lose himself into the past, whether a choice, a necessity or an ambush. _

Now, he was in that place yet again, watching all the memories of different times, different situations, drifting away from him. Standing, looking out at the standard, familiar view, it struck him that it was as if nothing had changed from that earliest scene. The apartment, the blood, the five years of tortured waiting and dissipating hope could almost have never happened.

However he knew, after this long, that while memories and dreams were shrouded with a mist of comfortable numbness, created by a buffer of time and repeated exposure, he couldn't live in them forever.

As if on cue, his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Pulling it out, he saw Munch's number and answered,

"Hey."

"Hi. How you holding up?"

Elliot was surprised at how good it was to hear his voice again after so long, but almost smirked at the concern emanating from the phone. John Munch and worry hadn't often gone together in one sentence, especially aimed towards him.

"Yeah, I'm fine, it's just....."

"The wait? Yeah, I know. Glad I'm not there to be honest."

"Good thing too, old man. You might make coffee again." Elliot smiles at the snort of indignation at the other end.

"The coffee machine is probably longing for me back, it wants to turn out a decent sludge instead of the weakling stuff that you all made!"

Elliot carried on the banter for a couple more sentences before the enormity of the situation could no longer be covered with stupid jokes and wisecracks.

"Anyway, I should go. They'll be back soon and I'll be roped into some terrible task or other. But.....call me....when you know something."

Suddenly Elliot could hear the age in the other man's voice, and an image of the last time he saw him formed before his eyes. The pain, the sorrow, the defeat in his eyes.

After he hung up, he stared at the screen for another second before putting it back in his pocket. It was hard to think of John sometimes without allowing the vicious, excruciating vision of him on the evening of Olivia's disappearance override all the good times, the laughter, the cynical ranting.

Even now, it was so painful it almost brought him to tears.


	5. Chapter 5 Losing

Before Elliot could lose it and let the tears fall, he heard the door to the roof open behind him. Not looking round, he guessed at the person coming towards him just from the sound of the steps, and he was almost glad of the company. Almost, but not quite.

"Figured you'd hide up here," Don said, standing with his hands in his pockets, close enough to be companionable but far enough away to not become consumed by the stress and tension radiating off Elliot.

"I needed a break from being down there. I....I didn't think it would feel like this," he admitted.

"Are you going to be able to hold it together?" The question and tone were reminiscent of their roles as captain and detective, during those days where various cases had pummelled their emotions and Elliot had threatened to go off the rails, again. "I don't need another Munch on my hands."

Elliot felt a flash of sadness as John was brought into the conversation. He was yet another example of how much things had changed, how far down the road they had come without Olivia.

"He called me, just now. Wanting to know if there was any news yet."

"Yeah, Fin said he had let him know during the drive down there." Don said, a strange edge to his voice as he continued, "I'm glad that they made it through, are still friends."

Elliot nodded, and visions of a midnight scene spiralled before his eyes: the moment the team seemed to stop holding their breaths and began the tumultuous roll downhill, that lead to where they were now.

"_Elliot looks up at the clock and sees that it is 1a.m, six hours since Warner had walked into the squad room and dropped her bombshell, four hours since official missing person flyers had gone out on the streets, and three since Kathy had called to demand to know why he wasn't home, and why he hadn't been in touch. _

_It was unreal to hear her voice, confused and accusatory, but surprisingly simple to snap out that Olivia had gone missing, and he didn't have time to come home, of even call._

_Of course, she had sounded hurt that he hadn't told her, and in the back of his mind there was a growing mountain of guilt forming, made up of needlepoint remarks issued to those who only cared, and the overwhelming contrition that he hadn't had his partner's back, hadn't stopped this hellish day from occurring. But he buried it, hung up, and moved on. _

_Now he's sitting upstairs at the table, hearing the phones ring and the murmur of voices below as uniforms and off duty detectives from all over the city answer the hotlines for information, provoked by the posters. So far, there has been nothing, and after two hours of listening to psychics telling him she was residing with Elvis or with aliens, and idiots asking if there was a reward, he had excused himself and retreated to work through some of the doubtful information already offered. _

_It has quietened ever so slightly from the hectic hustle that had sandwiched the revelation of the DNA evidence, chaos occurring until organisation had returned and the hotline set up. _

_Previous to Melinda's arrival there had been the franticness of uniforms coming and going, bringing in witness statements of Olivia arriving at her building; her passing a middle aged bachelor with his dog on their way out for a evening walk; and a CCTV image of her car waiting at a light as someone else blew through a intersection. _

_After, there had been rapid hunting for the files of their three linked rape victims, inputting the data back into VICAP for any new leads on who this guy was, and the start of trawling through old cases for anything that might tie together previous perps with a cause for revenge, these new crimes, and Olivia. _

_Despite the rising tension and foreboding that filled everyone's actions, no one had broken. Elliot, of course, had come close a couple of times. The first was when Cragen, Munch and Fin all walked back into the squad room that afternoon without any leads and, more importantly, without Olivia with them. Anger had risen at the sight of them, at them coming back instead of continuing to search, but he swallowed it and listened to logic. _

_The second came when an unsuspecting uniform dared to suggest that maybe they should call psychiatric facilities, that perhaps the strain of the job had got to her. Elliot nearly resorted to showing him what a breakdown of stress and rage would look like, but he took a breath and stepped away, only holding it together by thinking of Liv's disapproving, calming stare being directed at him. Weirdly, it worked even better without her there than it would in a normal situation. _

_He blinks and realises that the clock now says 1.04 am and he has wasted four minutes of looking through witness statements and the few, possible leads that they had. Perhaps he could have found the clue by now, if he hadn't been distracted. He could be on his way to finding her. _

_He looks down but before he can focus on the words, a crash below and a raised voice make him jump with a start to look over the bannister. _

_Fin is glaring at Munch, fury written all over his face, and the remnants of his desk phone are scattered across the floor. The rest of the room stand staring at them, two people holding their phones in the middle of a conversation. Cragen is a step away from Fin, but not acting._

_Elliot moves half way down the stairs, but Fin is yelling again before he can make it all the way._

"_What is your problem? Eh? You're the king of conspiracies, of looking at facts in different ways, of weird, fucked up lateral thinking and now you decide to only go for the possibility right in front of your face??" _

_They have rarely heard Fin this angry, his voice raised so loud. Fin argues with punctuated remarks, swear words and disparaging looks, he doesn't shout and he certainly doesn't do so at his partner. But, regardless, this is the scene playing out in front of his face and Elliot can hardly believe his eyes. This has to be a surreal nightmare, he's going to wake up and this whole fateful day will be wiped out._

_Munch is sitting, head bowed, as Fin continues his tirade._

"_How many years you been doing this job? How often do you know that things aren't as they seem and you're sitting there crying, assuming the worst, assuming she's dead?!?"_

_Elliot takes the last few stairs at a run and he isn't the only one who moving. Cragen has stepped in, braving the still gesturing arms and placing a hand on Fin's shoulder, but it is shrugged off._

"_You really think that little of Liv? How many times has she got out of sticky situations with no more than a scratch? God dammit, she's the only one of this sorryass bunch that ain't even got a bullet hole in her and you think she's dead!" _

_Cragen puts both hands on Fin now and pulls him away, muttering in his ear as he pushes him out of the room. Everyone is still staring, but they get back to work as the Captain barks at them before he vanishes. _

_John is unnaturally silent, his head bowed, cast in stone. Elliot braves getting closer but waits until he is sure the focus has been diverted before speaking._

"_You okay?" _

_There is still no movement and he crouches down, painfully aware that this is the pose he takes with victims, with those he feels need support and comfort. Looking at his face, he is shocked, despite Fin's words, to see there really are tears in John's eyes. _

"_Hey," he says louder, reaching out and shaking his shoulder. Finally he gets a reaction, and John lifts his head to rub his eyes. _

"_I haven't given up on her. I just...." Elliot doesn't know what to say or how to react so he stays silent, "I'm losing her. I've been sitting here and we're dissecting her life piece by piece, her face is on a missing poster and this all feels so far from the Liv I know." _

_He shakes his head. "How are we supposed to not get emotionally involved when the victim is someone we've seen nearly every day for ten years?" _

_Elliot can't speak but this time it's because he can feel his own emotions welling up inside at Munch's words, and if he breaks now then he will never pull himself back together. Victim. Olivia is now a victim. _

_John's phone rings and they both stare at it for a second before he answers and begins taking notes, not looking at Elliot still crouched beside him. The hubbub in the room is now back to normal and when he looks up, Cragen has come back in and is standing to one side. Elliot moves to him._

"_Fin is pummelling the punch bag. How's Munch?" Elliot shrugs._

"_I dunno. Not coping." Cragen nods and steps towards his office. "Think it's time to call Huang." he says, disappearing in and shutting the door. _

_Elliot stands in the middle of the room, looking round at the people answering phones, the pictures on the board, the homicide detective sitting at Olivia's desk, and knows that the Captain is right. The cracks are starting to show, things are disintegrating, and he's going to as well."_

John's words reverberated through his head, standing with Don beside him, and made him blurt out a question without even thinking.

"When did you start losing Liv?" As soon as he had voiced the words, he wanted to take them back. What right did he have to ask? But the man beside him answered anyway, the quiet, calm demeanour still there.

"After I called George, that night."

"_He sits in the solitude of his office, the dial tone resounding faintly in his ear before he put the phone down. On the desk there is a pile of paperwork, on top of which is one of the damn 'missing' fliers, and he cannot help but think of John sitting outside crying, and the bottle of vodka he keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk for his detectives. The two seem connected, linked, like they lead to the same thing._

_He tries to think of Liv, of the last few times he's seen her, to try and work out if she seemed off, acted differently. She's walking off the elevator as he heads towards it on his way to a meeting. She is normal, frustrated, but there is nothing that makes him worry. He asks about the boy they've just found, she shakes her head when she tells him about the evidence of extended abuse and they share a look of resignation before he steps onto the elevator and the doors shut._

_As he tries to trawl further back, suddenly there is nothing. Instead of thinking of her sitting quietly at her desk with a small smile or an exhausted aura, he can only see the blood and her photo, CCTV stills and DNA profiles. A picture that he knows has little of Olivia within in, and yet that's all he has. It's not even 24 hours and already he's losing her to procedure and investigation. _

Elliot nodded, staring down at the moving specks of people below, going about their lives without a care for the devastation of others, and was reminded again that he wasn't the only one who lost her that day. For a long time, he had struggled to remember that, but on a day like today he needed nothing more than to hold on tight with those who had known her best. That connection, that tangible link to her, was something that kept him from drowning completely. Don's honest admission was another part of the safety net.

"I came up to tell you, Fin called. They're about two hours out." He didn't know what to say in acknowledgement of that, so he said nothing. "Are you going to be okay?" Don repeated his question from earlier, and Elliot sighed.

"I have to be. I can't fail her in this."

Don took a couple of steps away, but then turned.

"You never failed her Elliot." His quiet words were heard but not processed or believed, and Don knew that. He braced himself for what he had to do now.

"But, you should know something about the man they're bringing in." Elliot looked sharply at him for the first time, confusion apparent. "Fin sent me this photo."

He took a pace closer to his ex-captain and rested his fingers on the side of his cell phone screen, tilting it slightly to get a better look. When he finally made out the features of the man, a buzzing filled his head, blurring his thoughts.

"That's him?"

Don nodded, and shut the phone.

"You still going to hold it together?"

He was aware that he was nodding, asking for a few more minutes, but only jerked back to his senses when he heard the door to the roof shut. Stepping back over to the ledge where he had been, he leaned right over, breathing deeply and trying yet again to not vomit.

Instead, he kicked the wall, glad of the pain, and roared,

"Son of a bitch!"

The anguished shout rose up into the sky and, in putting his hands out to rebalance himself from the violence of the action he had made, he knocked the file beside him off the edge.

Reaching for it, his fingers caught the main majority of the file but her photo slipped from its paperclip and floated away, descending towards the street below. He watched the paper twist and turn, able to glance her face only for a second before she is too far gone.

With the image of the guy flashing again and again before his eyes, he almost wanted to take that leap after her.


	6. Chapter 6 Watching

Kneeling next to the wall and disregarding the cold and damp, Elliot frantically re-secured the papers and reports in the file, not caring which order they were in but cursing the loss of her photo, before standing and almost running downstairs. His thoughts were frozen on the face of the man, and yet spinning sickeningly fast with memories and emotions.

Going to Munch's old desk, he pulled the three files he had discarded towards him and tried to remember which one of the rape victims the guy in the photo was linked to, but his brain seemed depleted of coherence, made barren by the nauseating dread that had settled over him.

He muttered the three names under his breath, sour syllables rolling off his tongue with ease before his mind singled in on one and the image in his mind became clearer. Opening Kirsty More's file, he rifled through until he found the CD with the security camera footage he was looking for. Putting it into the computer, he waited impatiently as it whirred slightly before loading, and the scene of a convenience store became clearer, people standing in line before the cashier.

Moving the recording forward, he stopped it when he saw their 2nd victim on the screen and leaned in, looking closely.

There was the guy, standing two people behind the girl, holding a magazine. The image was slightly fuzzy but as he zoomed in, it was clearly the man that Don had shown him on his cell.

His knees slowly gave way until he hit the chair, the impact and horror of a memory became fully realised as he remembered sitting in that very room, with that very image in front of his eyes.

_He looks up as Olivia walks into the room holding a CD which she immediately loads into the computer below the screens, pulling up a chair and sinking into it. It's lunchtime, the day after their second victim was raped in her apartment, and he goes over and hands her the sandwich he got while she was gone._

"_This the security camera footage?" He sits down beside her and takes a bite into his own lunch while she distractedly opens hers before immediately forgetting it and focusing on the screen. _

"_Yeah. Hopefully there is something here." _

_Reaching over and grabbing his notes from the previous evening, Elliot is struck by the fact their victim, Kirsty More, has been in as definite in a routine as Laura was. Coming home from her work as a PA, she would stop at the store every evening for some necessity or desire, usually a candy bar or milk for her morning coffee. A comment she made sticks in his head,_

"_If someone wanted to follow me, it wouldn't be hard. I'm a creature of habit. Nothing ever changes in my life." _

_Before him, he sees the angled view of a store, the cashier at the back of the picture and the shelving reaching towards the camera. The time stamp declares it three days before their victim was raped. Liv quickly forwards through until she gets to the time Kirsty said she usually went in, from 7.30pm onwards. _

_They sit in soft silence, both watching people coming and going with their lives without even considering that they may be watched. After ten minutes, Elliot stands and gets coffee but Liv doesn't even glance down when he puts it beside her hand, her attention entirely on the screen. She has eaten three bites of her meal but distractedly dissects the rest, tearing up small pieces of bread and the paper around it and piling them up as she watches. _

_He leans back on his chair and sips his own coffee, not paying attention as people come and go behind him in the room, contemplating the slightly blurred figures. _

_Suddenly Liv points and pauses the tape. _

"_Is that her?" _

_Elliot shifts forwards and looks at the girl with dark hair, holding a carton of milk and wearing the long coat she had said she always wore. Without bothering to confirm that it is their victim, they watch as she stands in line, keeping an eye both on her and the people in the store around her. _

_Behind her there is a guy with dark, almost black hair, and behind him another guy with lighter hair. The first glances at his watch twice while he is waiting, the other plays with his phone and then puts headphones in. Neither are wearing gloves, and both are of a similar, average, size._

_Kirsty walks out and both guys leave soon afterwards. _

_They skip through the next 20 hours and focus in again on the following day, 2 days before the rape. Watching the video speeded up to save time, the people are jerky and awkward, puppets directed by an unknown puppeteer. They see Kirsty enter the store again and slow it down, looking closely at the screen to check through the other people around her. There is a woman with a stroller loading a basket with groceries, and an older man with a walking stick, but other than that there appears to be no sign of a viable suspect until someone in a hoodie comes into view. _

_Elliot leans over to pause the image and looks closely at the guy. _

"_You think that's the man from last night? The one that was second behind her?" _

_Liv looks unsure._

"_Carry on with the tape?"_

_Kirsty picks up a candy bar and goes to pay, but the guy doesn't move from browsing the magazines. When she waves to the cashier and then leaves, he puts the magazine back on the shelf and walks out after her, hands shoved in his pockets._

_Without speaking, Liv gestures for him to rewind the tape and he does so, stopping when she points to the screen. As the guy turned, they could see his face, and Elliot zooms in. _

"_Looks like the same one." _

_  
Elliot grunts in agreement, and they stare at him for a couple of seconds, carefully assessing his face for identifiable features. He's a normal looking man, probably just over 6ft, but under the bulky clothes they can't judge body type or exact weight. His hair is covered by the hood of his sweatshirt, but it's undoubtedly the guy from the night before. _

_Keeping the screen up, Elliot prints off the insignificantly fuzzy still before they settle down to the stunningly tedious task of going through the next two days of clips. _

_Elliot feels a morbid foreboding when they get to the day of the rape and he watches the last images of Kirsty going through her day, glancing at the time stamp and knowing that in less than ten minutes she will be attacked and raped. In twenty minutes she will lie on her apartment floor and sob down the phone to the 911 operator. In fifty minutes, she will recount the ordeal as Liv hands out tissues and he curses silently that this is the same MO, and they now appear to have a serial rapist._

_Less than an hour. How much can change. He wants to pause the tape and stop her leaving the store but that's not what they do. They just scrape up the scattered pieces out of the sordid depths and try to wipe some of the pain from them. They can do nothing for the stains left behind._

_Olivia sighs as the images end. _

"_We'd better speak to the cashiers, see if they recognise him." As she speaks, she leans back in her chair and runs her hand through her hair. _

"_You gonna finish that?" Elliot nods towards the torn up bread and scattered paper, but she shakes her head. "Let's go then." _

The footage on the screen had long finished by the time Elliot's memory fadee, but the feeling of Olivia still hung in the air. Their conversation on the way to the store, the gentle comfort in the idle talk, and her almost imperceptible shifting of attitude as they prepare to show the picture to Kirsty were all so clear that he wanted to reach out and touch them.

Kirsty hadn't recognised him, but when they had shown the picture to the first victim, Laura, she said she might have done, although she couldn't pinpoint when or where.

Putting the CD back into its place in Kirsty's file, Elliot couldn't help but remember another CD that must be in Olivia's. Pulling it out, he traced his finger lightly over the rainbow surface, wondering if he should watch it or not. It wasn't necessary at all, there was no information on it pertaining to their perp, and it was still seared into his mind, branded in all its devastating clarity.

"_He, Munch and Fin are all standing in front of a TV screen in the squad room, surrounded by officers both on and off duty as the news reporter begins. There is an aura in the air, so thick that it blankets them with combined fear, stress and a desperate longing. The pain in Elliot's chest is so sharp that he dreads it breaking out, slicing the paper thin defences that remain._

"_We now cross live to a NYPD appeal here in Manhattan, concerning the disappearance of Special Victims Detective Olivia Benson, who has now been missing for over 24 hrs."_

_The Chief of Detectives appears on screen, standing at a podium, Cragen slightly behind __and to the side of him._

"_This is an appeal to anyone who may be able to give us information pertaining to the disappearance and whereabouts of Detective Olivia Benson. Please be assured that all calls and information will be treated with the utmost discretion. I hand over to Captain Cragen with the details. Thank you."_

_Cragen steps forward and Elliot is already tensing, not wanting this to happen but knowing that it must. He doesn't know how he is going to bear hearing the details in such a public way, yet another reaffirmation of reality, but his eyes won't leave the screen as the Captain starts speaking._

"_Olivia Benson was last seen walking into her apartment building," a picture of which flashes up, "at between 8.30 and 9pm the evening before last. She was wearing black suit trousers, a navy blue shirt and a black coat." _

_Now there is the photo of her on screen, her dark eyes seeming to catch Elliot's eye, and he is flooded with desire for her presence. There is the slightest trace of a smile on her lips, and seeing her picture in the place that so many missing peoples has been before causes his stomach to clench and the muscles through his jaw ache with emotion. _

"_We believe that she entered her apartment, as signs of struggle were found. However, we have no further leads as to the events that followed, or her whereabouts at this time. If you think you may have seen her, or may have information that may lead to her or someone who may have something to do with her disappearance, please ring this number...." _

_As Cragen reels off the tipline and thanks the public, Elliot turns away and Munch lies a hand on his shoulder._

"_Maybe something will come of this," he says quietly, but there is no conviction within the statement and Elliot doesn't respond. He can't, even if he wants too. His chaotic feelings are holding his voice hostage while screaming for release, for the tension and flood of emotions to cease. It's violently overwhelming and within that moment, he feels like he may never be able to speak again."_

Blinking, Elliot realised he was still holding the CD of the press conference in his hand, having never loaded it. He put it back in the file and closed it before leaning his elbows on its surface and rubbing his hands across his face. Time was doing strange things, and he felt like it must be days since Don came and fetched him, instead of just a couple of hours.

The still of the guy that he pulled out of Kirsty's file was still in front of him, taunting him, and he stared at the face. If it would do any good to punch a piece of paper, tear it into shreds with his teeth, cruelly annihilate it, he would, but he knew that it would be a pointless task.

There was movement across the room and Don came over to him, sitting on the edge of the desk and nodding down at the picture.

"You were right. I'm sorry." The apology from the older man was another needle in his numb heart, and he shook his head.

"Don't be. You weren't to know. None of us were." Elliot tried to sound reassuring but the words didn't come right, instead appearing gruff and caustic.

"Then why do you get to blame yourself, but I can't blame myself?" Don asked, a quiet statement rather than a question but Elliot let the words circle through his head for a minute before shaking it.

"I don't know."

"After all, it was me that told you to look for other suspects. After Joanna." Hearing the guilt shooting through his words, Elliot wanted to shake him, make him see sense, and a small voice in the back of his mind commented that this is what people so often wanted to do to him. To make him realise that it wasn't his fault.

"_They're in the squadroom, Olivia and Elliot leaning against her desk, Munch and Fin on Munch's, and Cragen to one side of the board. It's the morning after their third victim, and even though the DNA results haven't come back yet, all three pictures are up, with a line leading to a single, unknown perp._

"_I still think we should try and hunt down the store guy," Elliot suggests. "He's the only one we've got that ties even two of our victims." _

"_But your third didn't recognise him, and neither did your second, even though we saw him around her. And your first wasn't sure," Fin interjects. _

_  
"He could still be the guy. Laura said she thought she knew him from somewhere," Elliot keeps pushing. It's all they've got, and with no security camera footage that can chart Joanna's movements over the last few days, barring a miracle it's all they're going to get._

"_It's a pretty standard looking man El. And none of our vics actually got a look at their rapist," Liv says, and he throws her a quick glance of annoyance that she is in the process of shooting down the only lead they have. Cragen nods._

"_I think we need to look for another connection. Go back to all three, go through every second of their days, try and find SOMETHING that ties them together, other than they are all single women who come home later in the evening and might have seen a guy who we have no identity for." _

_Elliot sighs, goes to pick his coat up from the back of the chair, and Olivia gives him a look, but hers isn't of irritation. Instead, there is a sympathy that she cannot agree with his thoughts, and it does its job, settling his frustration a fraction. They walk out together."_

A more cynical, acerbic, biting voice suggested that perhaps who to blame was Olivia herself, since she hadn't backed up her partner when it counted. That was the worst, the same sense that he thought rang through the head of survivors of rape when they tried to make sense of their experience, blaming themselves so there could be some control, some meaning. He hated it because it made him feel like a victim. But what right did he have, to act the injured party, when it was her that was gone?

"Perhaps you could entertain the notion that neither of you were at fault."

Both men looked up at the new voice in the room, and Don rose up when he saw Alex standing in the doorway.

"Hey," he said as she moved over to them, putting her bag down on a desk and leaning in to kiss Don on the cheek. She nodded at Elliot and put a hand on his shoulder, but he didn't stand up, instead just reaching out with one arm so that it touched her back for a second in companionship. "You heard then."

Alex nodded.

"Grapevine works fast, especially for something like this."

There didn't seem to be much more to say for a second, and Elliot could feel Alex's hand squeezing his shoulder harder. Perhaps it was a gesture of comfort, but he could also feel the tension radiating from her that was also present both in himself and Don next to them. The waiting for the storm to hit.

Suddenly, a small sound of shock broke the silence, and Elliot looked up in surprise at Alex as she leant further over him.

"Is this the guy? The guy Fin's bringing?" Her voice rose towards the end of the sentence and both men stared at her in concern as she lifted the paper. Her hand was shaking, a tremor matched in her tone.

"Yeah," Elliot confirmed, watching her face grow visibly paler. The composed elegance seemed to be slipping, and a fragile vulnerability appeared in her eyes, horror flashing across them.

"Alex, what is it?" Don asked, and shifted slightly towards her as if she was about to faint.

"I recognise him. This guy."

"What!?" Astonishment rang through Elliot's voice and he shot to his feet, his words scorching the air around them as he turned to her. "From where?"

Her face was marble white, as if it was she that was the ghost from the past and not Liv or the man in the picture.

"He....he....." her voice wavered faintly and Don held out a hand to her, holding her elbow, ready to catch, "he was outside Olivia's apartment. The day of the press conference."


	7. Chapter 7 Blaming

Elliot leapt from his seat, and both men stared at her, the words paralysing them and sending cold, sickening dread through their veins. She seemed captivated by the photo in front of her, the paper trembling softly as though blown by a breeze, or the whisper of one.

"Alex," Elliot grabbed her shoulders and turned her to look at him, "What do you mean you saw him?"

Her eyes refused to meet his, avoiding the question as if guilty about something, and he wanted to shake her violently, to get all the information he could out of her, forgetting for a second that she had become a good friend through the years. Over her shoulder he was aware of Don moving, and when he began to direct her into the chair Elliot had just vacated, he was forced to spin away and clench his fists in an attempt to regain control, before taking a breath and turning back.

"Alex," Repeating her name, he leant on the desk and looked at her again. Slowly, she started speaking but her voice sounded strange, as if devoid of all humanity. Like she was relaying someone else's story, without care or compassion.

"I went there to pick up a file that Olivia had. I needed a piece of information to postpone one of the cases. It was due to start the next day. She was the arresting detective. "

Elliot remembered the chaos that her disappearance had caused, the cases that had been indefinitely postponed. The two guys that had got off because she wasn't there to testify and their ridiculously expensive lawyers had used it to their advantage.

"There was a crowd outside. People were already leaving flowers, seemed to have done so since the press release. Like they knew already that she was dead. It make me feel so sick, that strangers were giving up on her. He was just standing there, looking at them. The flowers. Reading the cards people had attached."

Listening to her, Elliot could feel the shock radiating from her in waves. He was so familiar with that numb feeling, the cascade of fear as the blood drained from the face, the chill settling onto the skin.

"When one of the uniforms standing outside happened to look at him, he was really edgy. And then he left."

Her voice had dropped to a whisper at the end, and the final words hit the desk like an anvil dropping from the sky. Before he could help it he had spun away from the desk and was staring blindly across the room, so ingrained into his life and yet so eerily strange.

"Son of a bitch."

His voice was fury. "Why did nobody see him, pick up on him, recognise him?" No answer came and his anger and frustration was accelerating fast, rolling with no brakes.

"She might have still...."

A deathly hush fell as his unspoken words reverberated round them. He could hear the echo, and he was pretty sure Don and Alex could as well.

"_She might have still been alive then."_

Alex deflated in her chair, pressed down by the silence. Her voice was little more than a murmur but clear as a bell in the air.

"I didn't know. The rapes never got to me. You never had anything for me to act on."

"Nobody's blaming you," Don said. Elliot shook his head and turned away, resting a hand on Alex's shoulder and sighing apologies.

"I'm sorry.....I didn't mean....it's just...."

There was no end to the sentences, and yet those who heard them, who were sitting in that space knew exactly what they were without needing the words. They were a feeling, an understanding born of the nightmare.

He sunk down at another desk. Alex's guilt was igniting his yet again. It was always there, from the very first minute of her disappearance to that very second. Suddenly, Huang's words flooded into his mind from the the evening after the press conference. The second day.

"_He's sitting in the locker room when Huang finds him, having just got out of the shower. After changing into fresh clothes, instead of going back and listening to useless information from well meaning people, he is staring at her locker. _

_It had been opened, the first day, to look for clues, or any answer that might be hidden inside. Of course, there had been none. Now it's locked again and he's thinking about how many pieces of her are sealed behind the door. Spare clothes for the nights they never get a chance to leave. Deodorant that makes up part of her scent. Make-up. A lipstick with traces of her still on it. Her gym clothes. _

_Huang comes in and leans against the lockers, looking at him. El doesn't look back._

"_Should I ask how you're doing?" _

_He shrugs. _

"_Well, let me know when you're about to lose it. People are falling apart down there so some warning would be good."_

_Elliot is shocked by the blasé attitude that George is showing in the face of such a situation, the gallows humour that is mildly inappropriate at the best of times but seems horrific now. However, when he dares a glance, he sees the other man's careful look and realises that he's being pushed. Tested. _

"_You not going to tell me it's all going to be okay? Or that it's not my fault?" He sounds bitter but he doesn't care. _

"_Is it?" _

_Elliot shakes his head and balls his fists for just a second before releasing. His partner is missing and he can't be doing with the psych approach of questions in reply to questions, but he also knows that the moment he loses it is the moment he is off the case, sent home, maybe locked up. And this is too important. A dazed silence falls for a minute before Huang speaks again._

_  
"It's probably not going to be okay. And you won't let go of the guilt, no matter what. Not even if I stood here talking all night."_

_He sighs._

"_You'll hold onto this forever. Guilt gives you the illusion of control in an uncontrollable situation. The 'if I had done this, or that' creates an escape. It stops this being unanswerable. A random event. Except, it's already happened, and the truth is there is nothing you can do. And you're going to have to work out some way of living with that for the rest of your life. Whatever happens. Or it will destroy you." _

_Elliot is still hanging on for now, but the mention of destruction makes the thought sneak into his mind again. What if? What if this is life now? This dread, this guilt, this fear. Isn't destruction far preferable right now?"_

Elliot sat and looked at the other two people, both consumed by their own thoughts. He didn't doubt for a second that both carried the same guilt as him. Alex's was clear to see, she seemed smothered by it in light of the new information. Don's ran much deeper, and encompassed them all, not just Liv. The accumulation of years of death, despair and tragedy that the job had brought into their lives weighed him down. Olivia's disappearance and his helplessness within it was only a part.

Capt. Price came out of her office as they sat, and looked at all three of them in their various stages of disintegration before speaking.

"It shouldn't be too long now."

Elliot knew her calm, professionalism should be calming, but instead he found it suffocating. Part of him wanted everyone to be falling apart, the whole world, instead of just him. Escaping, he muttered something unintelligible that nobody could hear, that no one would bother to try and decipher.

Walking on autopilot, he found himself at the door of the crib, that hadn't changed a bit in the years since he had set eyes on it. Gazing in, he imagined he could see her, lying there, fast asleep from a case. The scene he could visualise before him was so peaceful, so real, and he wanted to hang onto the image forever but it transformed before his eyes and then it was him lying there. Him on the first night he got some rest, over 72 hours since she had last been seen. And, yet again, the thought danced through his head that perhaps this was the time insanity was going to take him. That seeing himself as if from above was the next step toward a psychiatric unit. Just as it might finally be over.

_He's stayed at his desk while first Fin, then Munch, step into Cragen's office for fleeting moments before taking their coats and walking out of the door. The first time since..._

_He can't finish the sentence, even to himself. _

_Part of his brain tries to argue that their leaving isn't the next, bitter step towards defeat, but just because they need the rest. The crib is almost full of extra detectives and uniforms that have come in to help, both those ordered too, and those that are giving up their spare time. But it doesn't help much. _

_Within his own mind, he cannot, dare not think of going home. Of lying in his bed with Kathy breathing next to him, with Olivia out there somewhere. Walking out will feel like leaving her behind. Cragen had told him to call her earlier, had dialled his home number for him and handed him the phone as Kathy answered. _

_But whatever Cragen had been trying to achieve hadn't worked. Her worry simply frustrated him, not only for taking up his time but for sounding like she was more concerned with him than with Olivia. He was fine, it was her that people should be focused on. For a brief, fleeting moment it occurs to him that he would have been annoyed whatever her response was. Had she shown understanding he would want to yell at her, to shout that she couldn't possibly know what this feels like. And had she shown more concern about Olivia, he would feel stupidly possessive. She was his partner, his to worry about, not hers. _

_It's 2am and the words in the sentence in front of him have warped into one, indeterminate scrawl across the page when Cragen steps out of his office. _

"_Crib. Now." When he looks up at him, the older man shows all the signs of exhaustion that Elliot feels, but his stance is firm and his jaw set. Elliot attempts to argue, to negotiate, in words reminiscent of hearing his children plead for a later curfew. _

"_One more tip," He holds out the sheaf of papers in front of him. "What if the next one is it?"_

_Cragen takes the papers off him and scans the next sheet on the pile. _

_  
"It's not. And you're so far beyond tired that you're liable to miss it if it were." He seems sad, resigned, but Elliot can tell he knows he's won this. He's said the one thing that will make him obey the order. The thought that he might miss finding her because of his own, stupid stubbornness isn't worth it. _

_Without another word or look he stumbles upstairs, but before stepping out of sight he looks at the room from above. There are strangers at all the desks except hers, his place having been taken already. He wonders if this is some kind of premonition, if he is seeing before him what is to come. Them all gone, and an empty space at Liv's where no one dares to sit._

_Making his way to an empty bed in the crib, he carefully avoids looking at the younger homicide detective fast asleep where Liv would normally be, and lies down. The room is full of gentle breathing and he tries to close his eyes and simply focus on that sound. The sooner he gets to sleep, the sooner he can get up again and find her. _

_Instead, his mind begins to work, but not as he had feared. It is both better and worse than letting his imagination have full rein to see all the things that could have happened to her. In lieu if the nightmare scenarios, it trawls through his memories and begins tossing ones of her at him. Good ones, bad ones, events that meant nothing at the time. Ordinary days that he should have forgotten but for some reason didn't._

_She's opening the car door and getting in, handing him his coffee before settling in with her own. All the noise is their sips as they sit and watch to see if their suspect is going to move. It's quiet and settled, and even though it was just a standard day, in the face of the last 72 hours it is sprinkled with gold dust. _

_Now he's tossing a wad of paper across the desks to Munch, and she snorts when he misses an easy catch. Looking at her, he sees she has a resigned smirk on her face as she settles back down to her paperwork. He resists the temptation to throw the paper at her. _

_Her rage is filling up the interrogation room and, sitting next to her, he can see why the suspect looks scared. Her muscles are tense throughout her whole body and there is bite to her words as she works him over. All he has to do is sit and watch. Finally the guy snaps, breaks down, and begins to cry with regret. She shoots him a witheringly disgusted look and leaves the room, slamming the door behind her. His job is easy, the perp wants to tell everything now she has shattered him. _

_All these and a hundred other fragments are bombarding him, and he lets himself begin to drown. It's easier than facing the truth. He goes to sleep in a bar, her sitting across from him drinking beer and listening to Munch rant and rave. He doesn't dream._

_The ache in his back signals that he is in the crib the instant he wakes up, but he hasn't got a clue what time it might be. The moment he remembers fearing the previous evening hasn't occurred; the knowledge she is missing has been lurking since he first began to surface from the depths of sleep and he doesn't have to bear the split second where everything is as it should be before the hurricane hits. It's already ripped him to pieces and settled in what is left. _

_Still, he keeps his eyes closed, even though he knows he should get going. Perhaps she's lying next to him, in another bed. He'll open his eyes and see her. She'll laugh when he tells her his dream. But he knows it's not true, and his attempts to kid himself make him want to hit the man he is becoming. Self pity is weak, and weakness isn't going to get her back. Nor is longing or dreaming or imagining._

_He drags himself out of the bed and goes to freshen up. Glancing at his watch once he's splashed his unshaven face with water, he sees that it's almost 7am. Some water drips on his shirt and he mutters under his breath for getting the clean one wet, before stopping himself. It isn't clean at all, it's been about 36 hours since he showered and changed. It's now creased and slept in, and he knows he hasn't got another one in his locker. How can it be that it is so long since that shower. Where has the time gone? How can she have been gone for so long?_

_When he goes downstairs, a shift change has occurred again. Fin and Munch are sitting at their desks, coats still on, talking. He suspects they have come in together, as moral support, though he has no reason to think that they would, he just knows. When he looks at them, and then at Olivia's still empty desk, rage begins to swell slightly. They have each other and he is alone. It's more self pity, and he shakes his head to rid himself of it._

_Walking over to the coffee machine to pour himself a cup, he gestures the pot towards the two of them, offering it. Both shake their heads._

"_We're off to follow up on some of these. Maybe..." Fin lets his voice trail off. The words imply hope, his tone and sadness in his eyes don't. Munch doesn't say a word as they leave, his shoulders bowed. He looks defeated. The sight of self pity in someone else makes him feel nearly as angry as it did when it flared in himself. _

_After an hour of renewed searching through the incredible amount of paperwork generated, Cragen walks in with two people behind him, a woman and a man. He comes up to Elliot's desk and gestures to the woman, introducing her first. _

"_This is Detective Sarah Harris, from Brooklyn SVU. She's come in to pick up some of the other ongoing cases we have. And this is Ken Adams. He's gonna be....well......I thought you could do with someone to help while you follow a few leads. So you can get out of this building."_

_Elliot sizes him up. The guy is older than him by a few years, still firmly built, with a scar on one cheek. He knows he should like him, that he would in any other situation, but he knows also knows the word that Cragen has avoided saying. Partner. This guy was his new partner, temporary or not. That whatever was going to happen, even if they found her alive, she probably wasn't going to be okay to come straight back to work. This knowledge feels like a band-aid he has been carefully constructing being ripped off, the first beginning thoughts of a future scalding the open wound. _

_When they get back from a day chasing wild geese round Manhattan, Cragen seems half surprised when they walk in together. Elliot suspects, no, knows, that he was expecting trouble. In truth, they had worked fine together, not that there had been much to do. The other man had let Elliot drive, stayed silent and backed him up when needed. _

_As they settle down to work, he hasn't even made the mistake of sitting at Liv's desk. Neither has the female detective, Harris, who is sitting and looking through the files of their cases. She asks a few questions of Elliot as the day draws to a close, and when he looks over at her once, his eyes are drawn to the paperwork on her desk, and the fact he can see Olivia's handwriting there. For a second he can't breathe, so he looks away._

_At 8pm, Cragen comes out of his office again and says those who need too should go home, looking pointedly at Elliot. Adams stands and leaves, but Harris makes no move and neither does Elliot. Cragen doesn't take his eyes off him. _

"_You too."_

_He doesn't even bother to reply, or indeed to look at his boss. Ignoring him isn't something that he would normally do. Argue, disagree, disregard orders perhaps, but not act as if he didn't exist. But these aren't ordinary circumstances, and normal rules, both professional and personal, don't apply. _

"_Elliot." _

_This time he does glance up, but only to shake his head. He hasn't the energy to argue, but he wants to catch up on what happened in the squad room while he was running round the city in a pointless, desperate search._

_Cragen sighs and walks back into his office. _

_An uneasy tempo settles over the squad room, made up of exhaustion, adrenaline, sickening fear and anxiety. Harris asks him for some information on one of the cases she is covering and despite the fact it draws him away from Olivia's case, it is almost a relief to pay attention to something else. However, it is a relief covered in a coating of guilt for failing her, letting his tenuous hold on her go for even a second. _

_Suddenly, through the atmosphere, he hears his name and looks up in surprise. Kathy is standing in the doorway of the squad room, concern plain across her face. Cragen appears. _

"_Thanks for coming Kathy."_

_He stares at them in disbelief. Cragen had called his wife. Like the school might call a parent when the child was sick or acting out. He feels useless, demeaned, like all elements of control are being stripped from him. Kathy approaches and takes his hand, but he carries on staring at Cragen._

"_Go home Elliot. Please. Or I'm going to have to force you too." He wants to fight it, wants to rage and scream and argue. How can he explain the feeling that Olivia is within this room, that she needs him here, that him staying here is keeping her here as well. If he leaves, she is gone. He tenses his weary bones for the fight, before something changes before his eyes._

_Cragen looks old. Old and weary and defeated. It's the same look as Munch's back had shown as he walked out of the room. Without a conscious thought to it, Elliot doesn't have it in him to weigh more pain and pressure on his shoulders. _

_Nodding, he goes to his desk and picks up his jacket, but he has still not acknowledged Kathy. _

"_Call me if.... even if its nothing." _

_Cragen gives a small nod, and without daring a look at Olivia's desk, Elliot walks out of the room, Kathy beside him. _

_The journey home is silent, Kathy driving and him sitting with unseeing eyes at the night time sights and sounds. He is aware of one part of his brain searching, searching every section of the views in front of him for her, for any sign. Maybe a huge sign illuminated in the darkness, directing him to her._

_When they arrive home, it's to a silent house. At first he thinks that all the children are in bed, but as they walk into the kitchen he sees Maureen and Kathleen sitting at the table. Without speaking, both walk up and hug him, and he almost allows himself to lose himself in their arms. To break down in their love and the change of role. They are offering him comfort and care, but it becomes too much. Pulling away, he sees them look worriedly at him before turning their glance to their mother, searching for advice. He is aware of her shaking her head and gesturing to the stairs, and so both gently leave. _

_All he wants to do is grab a beer, something stronger, anything, but again that feels like waving a white flag. Admitting that there is a reason to destroy himself. Instead he goes and sits down on the couch, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. Silence hangs for minutes as he feels his muscles relaxing and his mind beginning to venture to unwanted scenarios. As an attempt to combat it, he opens his eyes. Kathy has moved, is standing looking at him, and he can see tears in her eyes. _

_He closes his. He cannot see this. He won't. _

As the memories stopped and the reality of the day began to take over him again, Elliot realised he had moved, and was now sitting on a crib with his head in his hands. It didn't surprise him, that he had acted without being aware. He had lost himself so many times within the past that he was used to it.

Taking a deep breath in, he braced himself to go downstairs again. The time was approaching, ever slow, the seconds taking hours as he sped through the past in his mind. Nevertheless, he knew that it was coming.

As he left the room and went to face the music, it occurred to him that after the past five years, it felt somehow too easy, trapped in the midst of excruciating pain. Part of him had become so inured to what could be thrown at him. It hadn't been the same in those first few, vicious days, when every second got worse and worse.

Like the day after the last flashback. The day of the body.

Even the thought of that memory sickened him, and despite knowing that it was pointless to attempt distraction, that the flashback would claim him no matter what, he made his way downstairs to the present hell.

Needing every second he could get to ward it off, he wasn't sure how much more of the memories he could take. He remembered somewhere that working back through painful trauma was supposed to be therapeutic but it wasn't. It was simply an ongoing torture that he knew would never end. No matter what the outcome or what waited down those stairs.


	8. Chapter 8 Resuming

When he made his way downstairs, his first sight was Alex leaning over a trash can, Don rubbing her back gently and helping to hold her hair back from her face. Seeing this was like being hit in the mouth, a blow that sent him reeling and paralysed him.

People vomiting on this job was nothing new, he had seen before from young cops not used to bodies or blood or death, from witnesses not able to cope with the pressure, but it was the first time he had seen Alex lose her composure like that. The scene before him, her obvious distress, and the smell of her stomach acid filling the air was enough to tip him over the edge. In the last five years, it had never taken much.

_On the morning of day six it is easy to get up, despite it being a Saturday. No coffee or extra five minutes required, the moment he wakes, his body iss full of adrenaline and desperate to go; if he doesn't move, doesn't find her, he is going to burst out of his skin. _

_Now he's prowling round the squad room, anxious to get out there, but his temporary partner is in Cragen's office talking and Munch and Fin have gone to Staten Island after someone reported seeing a dark haired woman being dragged into an apartment four days ago. He's trying to keep the hope, the faith, but so far there are no leads to fuel the dimming light, just the DNA of an unidentified man. He keeps seeing her vanish in his mind, walking in through the door of her place and then fading into nothing. It doesn't work like that, she didn't simply 'go', but with no other solid information, it's the easiest way to think. _

_When Elliot is on his twelfth lap of the squad room Cragen bursts out of his office, Detective Adams close behind, their coats in hand and tension apparent. _

"_You..." For a second he pauses, and Elliot can almost see cogs whirring within his brain as he makes a decision. He feels sick, as though an axe is about to fall as he kneels before his executioner. "We've got a call."_

_Cragen seems reluctant to tell him more, but the fact he is not running out of the door signifies there is no good within this news. _

"_Coastguard have pulled a body out of the river. A bag over the head. General age and body type are right. Warner's on her way to the scene. So are we."  
_

_Elliot is frozen for a second as the knowledge seeps its way to his brain. "Right". Isn't this all wrong, not right? Then a shadow of composure falls across him and he steels himself. It isn't the time to be Olivia's partner. It's the time to be a detective, time to get through, time for answers. Without saying a word, he joins them as they hurry out of the building._

_It is a short journey made faster by the lights and sirens, and they pull up to the windswept area before Warner does. Elliot can see a small group of people standing over what must be the body, and the thought crosses his mind for a fleeting blink that he cannot do this. That he should just sit in the car and wait for others to do the deed. If it is her, then she could have been in the river for all these days. She won't be Olivia. She'll be something else._

_But without thinking further, he gets out. This is his job, and not only that, but his responsibility. He wants to see her, has to see her. No one else but he should be the one to identify her, to bring her back to them. No matter what nightmares seeing her brings. _

_Walking over to the group, he feels Cragen beside him. The people part without asking for badges, without having to be asked to step aside, and there it is at his feet, a sheet shrouding the vague outline of a body. He crouches down, automatically pulling gloves on, and for a second he can see what he is about to without having to do it. His sick mind has already put dead features on his picture of her, dyed her skin, added wounds. It's chilling, all encompassing and he thinks that nothing can be as bad as what is in his mind's eye._

_He pulls the sheet back. _

_The woman's head is still covered in a bag, but he thinks he can tell from just the build of the shoulders that it's not her. He's not sure though, his memory is still playing tricks, blurring the lines. Glancing up at Cragen as he reaches for the knot of the rope holding the bag on, he receives permission and undoes it, as gently as if he was getting tangles out of a child's hair. Then it's loose, and he closes his eyes as he pulls it off._

_It's not her._

_The relief of this fact hits him at the same time as the realisation that he had known it wasn't her, right from the start, from the moment of Cragen leaving his office. He doesn't know how, or why, he had known this, but it seems too simple, too easy an end to this torture. How can something as unimaginably unbearable end in such a place, with a quiet look at a body and the gaze of a few cops?_

_Even so, he is forced to move away fast, pushing through the people still standing around and leaning against a squad car for support as he vomits again and again and again, burning bile rising from nowhere and searing his flesh, choking him. _

_Finally it stops, and when he looks up he sees Warner give him a sympathetic glance as she makes her way to the body. It's the first time he has seen her since she brought the DNA results in and she looks awful. He hadn't thought she would, that this would hit her like this. It's not like she won't have had cops in her morgue before now. But she hasn't got Olivia there. Just the dread. _

_When they arrive back at the precinct, Munch and Fin are standing by the coffee machine. Cragen asks them what happened with the lead, but Elliot doesn't listen. It doesn't matter, they would have called if it had been anything.  
_

_He spends the rest of the day shielded, wrapped in cotton wool, nothing getting in or out, and this time he doesn't argue when Cragen sends him home. He feels dazed the moment he leaves the precinct, but he ignores it. In fact, ignores everything, including his family, simply walking upstairs and going to bed. He is still awake when he feels Kathy looking at him before getting in beside him. He senses her grief, her worry, her despair, but he shows no sign of consciousness. What would be the point? _

_It is only on the drive in of the next day, with quieter roads and the relaxed aura coating everything that he realises it is a Sunday. Everyone is in though, and Cragen asks for their presence in his office. _

_Munch is sitting in one chair, the female detective in the other, and he, Fin and Adams dot themselves around the room. Elliot doesn't look at anyone, and holds his breath. _

_Cragen sits, encompassed in weariness. He avoids everyone's eyes as well. _

"_One P.P are scaling down the search," It's only now that he looks up, taking in everyone in turn, but no one reacts, just wait for the other shoe to drop. "The tipline is still open but there's very little activity now, just nutcases and whack jobs."_

_Elliot wants to snort, but suppresses it. Then he realises that what he really wants is to glance across at Olivia and give her a knowing smirk. He almost does, at thin air, just to see what would happen,whether the world would end and he could gratefully sink into insanity. Cragen is still talking. _

"_Detective Adams is also going back to his own squad. Detective Harris will be here for a while yet, helping us out on some of the other cases, getting things going again."_

_'Getting things going again'. Like they have stopped work for a holiday, gone on strike, been relaxing with their feet up. He closes his eyes, and simply listens. _

"_I'm not going to make any additional time off mandatory, unless I see the slightest sign that I should," There is an iron firmness laden over the words, "But the second anyone feels that they cannot do this any more, that they need some time or space, come to me. You'll go on paid leave, no questions asked." _

_Through his eyelids, Elliot feels Cragen's scrutiny of him. _

"_I'm also not going to expect you to take today off, despite it being a Sunday. Work if you must. BUT, each of you are expected to take a day off during the week this week, to make up for this weekend." He pauses. _

"_That IS mandatory."_

_It slams into him, the thought of a day off. Sitting still. With no work. Waiting for an answer that might never come. But his first desire at this mandatory sentence, to hit someone, will negate any chances of working for the next month._

"_Munch, Fin, there are a couple more calls to chase up from the tipline overnight. It doesn't seem that they will come to anything but you'd better check. Then I need you to do paperwork on the Cardenilli trial. Alex called this morning, trial starts on Tuesday." His tone changes, and it's that that makes Elliot open his eyes to see Cragen looking at him. _

"_We got a call this morning about the John Doe child from last Monday. Someone recognised him but wouldn't give any more information, just asked to see you Elliot. Seems they got hold of your card."_

_He hands him the address and nods to Sarah. "Take Harris with you. She's gone over what we've got about the boy."_

_And so life resumes. _

_As he drives, walks, sits beside the grandmother of the child and shows her the picture, looks concerned while she cries, and even while he listens to the information she can give, he feels one step removed, like someone has put up a glass wall between him and the rest of the world. _

_Once they got the I.D and went to the boy's apartment, the case was easy to solve, a matter for Warner and the C.S.U guys rather than any detective work. He and Harris find the mother dead in the bedroom, strangled, and the father having shot himself in the head, a suicide note and confession next to him. Seems he'd been abusing the boy but then the mother tried to leave, stealing him of his prey. He'd killed his son, then come home and killed his wife, before being full of remorse and ending it._

Elliot feels none of the melancholy relief of a case that's solved, or sadness for those involved, just a mixture of relief that it didn't take up too much time away from Olivia's, and a strange annoyance that it didn't take longer and he couldn't lose himself in it. It feels like a betrayal, to leave her case for a minute, like leaving her side or abandoning her, but the truth is the few seconds he didn't think of her were like painkillers suddenly kicking in, the agony receding briefly. 

_He had thought day seven was going to be the hardest, the survival of a whole week without her impossible to take, but the truth is everyone tries so hard to make it easier that it almost works. He isn't even let down when a news item discussing the fact she has been gone for a week yields no new results. When he leaves the precinct, he notices one of the missing posters put up all over the city is beginning to tear, its paper edges rolling in, the colours not so clear. _

_He stands and stares, her dark eyes fading before him, and he wants to sink to his knees and sob, tear the paper down and scream at her to come home, to stop leaving, to stay. He isn't aware of getting home that night, or going to bed, but he must have done. _

_It's that night that the nightmares start, and the next day that he cannot make it into work._

_She's floating in the river, face down, and he's trying to swim to her. She's falling from a building and he cannot reach her in time. She's bleeding out beneath his hands and he can feel her blood chilling. She's screaming his name, and when he wakes up with a gasp, it reverberates throughout him. _

_He lies there as the alarm goes off, and it is Kathy who has to lean over him and bring silence. He just doesn't move._

_After an hour of her watching him, he hears her call Cragen, say that it's finally hit him, that he won't be in today. The words sound stupidly false, it hasn't hit him at all. There isn't anything to do so. Just an empty space, and spaces can't cause blows. How could emptiness ever cause as much pain as a body or blood or answers? _

_Still, he doesn't speak for the day. Kathy and the kids tiptoe round him and she puts a plate of sandwiches in front of him that he doesn't touch. He watches them waiting for him to shatter, but he won't. Not today. That would be too easy as well. _

_Cragen approaches him the next day, the same apprehensive way everyone else takes around him. _

"_Sarah's agreed to stay on here for a while. Would you rather.....well, she could partner John or Fin if you'd like."_

Elliot can feel the effort it has taken to say that, and shakes his head. What if she comes back, and they've changed things round for no reason? Anyway, it doesn't seem fair that all of them should lose their partners. A tiny part of him considers for a second saying yes, split them up, let them feel this. But what would be the point?

"_Also......we need the desk space. Would you like me too....."_

_He gestures towards Olivia's place._

_Elliot gives him a long look, and Cragen nods. He cannot bear even his boss touching, moving, packing away her things. She's his, and so he will remove her, take her with him. _

_As he begins to box her stuff up, the room carefully empties so he is left alone. The paperwork he puts in piles for him or Cragen, the personal stuff goes into the box, her mother's case files at the bottom, the rest on top carefully, in case her hairbrush suddenly explodes and it isn't there, waiting for her to use it. When he's done there, the desk bare, he goes and asks Cragen for the combination so he can clear her locker, and maintenance come to open it._

_He finds a sweatshirt that still smells of her and stands for what feels like an age with it in his hands, looking. In the end, it takes him till lunchtime to move again. _

_That night, he asks Dickie to help him scan the photo of her and her mother, to make it as perfect as possible. He can't take the original, leave an empty frame, but the print-out onto photo paper is nearly as good. He folds it up and puts it in his wallet._

Five years on, he pulled out his wallet and took the folded up picture from it. There were crease lines across it, the edges tattered from the number of times it had been taken in and out. When he thought he'd lost his wallet once, it was the one thing he cared about, despite the original sitting in the box in the bottom of his closet. He knew he shouldn't have done, that the kids pictures should matter more, but he could take new ones of them. She was a ghost, captured for an instant, frozen in time.

When he ripped his eyes from the photo, Alex was sitting sipping water, and Don was studying him. He looked at the picture again before tucking it back away, and then smiled for a second. How ironic, that she was the one that could still make him smile in that hell, when she was the one whom the hell revolved around.

The agony, the fires of despair, continued to burn him the moment he walked back into the squad room, and saw her.


	9. Chapter 9 Failing

She was sitting at her desk.

There was another woman sitting at Olivia's desk.

He didn't know why it threw him so much, the sight of someone else there, her figure in the chair, like she had always been there. Other people had occupied the silent space since he had removed Liv, other women, but somehow, on that day of all days, it felt like another breath forced from him, another piece of the fragile composure he had carefully constructed over the past five years shattered.

Perhaps it was because she looked like she had been there forever, and would be there forever. He knew how false, how delicate, how fleeting that illusion was. The wind would come and, with a single gust, an exhale on the day it was least expected, everything was gone. She looked as solid as Olivia once had.

He went over to the coffee machine and poured himself the thick, bitter liquid, trying not to look concerned or put out. Brutally aware of her watching him, he refused to acknowledge her presence until she came over and helped herself to coffee as well. Waiting for her to move away from him was a lesson in stone, dark and solid, inflexible. What he wanted to do was shake her. Scream at her for being in that place. Destroy her, in the hope that Olivia would come back and take her rightful place. Silence was the only option. The only thing left within.

But she didn't move, and stayed standing beside him, leaning back against the table.

"You must be Detective Stabler." It was a clear statement of fact with no question at all within it, but he nodded anyway, by polite reflex.

"Yeah." He could just about get the word out but didn't elaborate or hold out his hand.

"I'm Kate. Kate Tarpley."

There was still nothing to say, all the normal lines of social conversation seeming trivial and pointless at that moment in time. She didn't seem to mind, at least, nothing in her voice or attitude changed. "Guess they'll be here in an hour or so." She glanced down at her watch.

"One hour too many." He said quietly, taking a sip and letting the coffee burn his mouth. It made him feel alive, real, not twisting in a surreal nightmare. Waiting had become an art form, a stillness created by holding each breath and containing each thought before it rampaged into chaos. Even so, as the prospect of resolution threatened, the universe spread out his suffering, relishing it. The scald of his mouth increased, and he held it for as long as he could before swallowing, searing his throat.

In that moment, he realised that he didn't have a clue what would come after. If there would be an after. How there could be.

"Five years too many." She commented, walking over to her desk and sitting down, turning the chair slightly in his direction but not looking at him, instead fingering the edge of papers on her desk. He sat down too, in the closest chair.

"Yeah, you're right there," He sighed, before looking up at her. Before he could stop himself he found he was inspecting and comparing her in his mind. She was shorter than Olivia, her hair paler and pulled back in a messy bun, and her build was slighter and wirier, although he could tell from the way her shirt clung slightly to her upper arms that she was strong. "She'd be fast in a fight." He thought, before trying to switch off the 'cop' voice in his head. It would be too easy an escape.

"How long have you been here?" He suddenly felt the need to break the silence, kill a few minutes with inane talk instead of dark and painful thoughts. She looked up at him and leant back in her chair.

"Two and a half years. Feels like a lifetime." She replied with a wry smile. He managed to give one back, though it was a fierce effort.

"Wait until you've done a decade or more." At that she gave a small shake of her head and glanced down at the small pile of files sitting beside her on the desk, at herself fingering them.

"No chance of that," she said, "I think I'll be lucky to make it another year. I don't know how Fin does it, or how you guys did for so long." Elliot took another sip of his coffee.

"I guess we'd have given it up at some point." A strange regret covered the words.

"You think?" She turned her head slightly to the side and looked quizzically at him as she posed the question. When he didn't answer, she continued, "I've looked through some of your cases, and your stats were.... impressive to say the least. Why leave that?"

"I could ask you the same thing," he replied, his voice containing a hint of irritation he hadn't meant it too. "You've put in two and a half years, why not carry on? Why are you counting down how long before you cannot bear it any more?"

She didn't seem perturbed at his bitter tone.

"Fair point. But after so long, surely you two got more accustomed to it? There can't have been so much that would shock or surprise you?"

He knew she wouldn't understand the irony if he tried to explain. The truth was, it had only been since he had stripped himself of the 'special victims' skin, since he had ceased to be one of those involved in the worst of the worst that things had stopped shocking him. Not that the world had become clearer cut or more innocent, he still knew the disgusting degradations people committed, the levels to which they had sunk. But somehow, doing the job, trying to overcome or bring justice to those acts had kept him still able to feel that shock, still alive. The fight had fueled his disbelief that people would do that. Once he had gone, and the fight had stopped, nothing surprised him any more. Except his own reactions to the world.

Instead he told her what she needed to hear.

"Every day I still get shocked. It's the day you don't that you have to stop." He thought, from her assessing look, that maybe she had seen through the lie, but then set it down to paranoia. Olivia would have seen through him in a second.

"So why did you leave?"

He shook his head. The story of his defeat, of his last desperate stand, had never got out, and to taint this day with more of his own failings seemed unfair.

Kate nodded as if he had answered.

"The rumour mill said that it was because you couldn't bear working with another partner. That you were impossible. That her loss made you break."

Elliot barked a sharp laugh, stinging with acrid, caustic pain.

"That could have been part of it." He didn't want to admit the truth, that she was too close, that he couldn't bear it was as simple as he couldn't do without her, but he still got the strange feeling that she knew anyway.

At that, there was silence for a minute as both stared into space, their thoughts nowhere near the room but nowhere the same place either. His were spinning through the past, fast gaining momentum as they had done all day, and he blocked them out as he waited for them to settle, waiting for them to find what they were looking for.

"I can't imagine what you must have gone through." She said.

"No. You can't" he thought. Don't even try. I hope you never have to go through it. It would kill you. It has me.

The being impossible with another partner was true though. Not that he had ever been anything like as uncontrollable or spontaneous as with Liv, or even as selfish. There was no rushing headlong into situations, no outbursts of rage, no beating of perps. There was nothing, and it was that space, that dance with ghosts and silence that stopped him.

_The first time he realises its going to be like this is in the second week. They've got a rape, woman attacked in the hallway of her apartment building, and the thought rushes through Elliot's head that maybe this was the guy striking again. When he realises they have fluids, he's happier still. A joy that tastes sour and disgusting._

_But then the DNA comes back. It's not a match to the blood in Olivia's place and his interest in the case wanes. Harris keeps him going, asks the right questions, tries to make him think, and thankfully the rapist is an idiot who showed his face on the security cameras in the entrance hall to the building. They bring him in, present the evidence and he confesses. _

_Easy as that. Case closed. The next day, he cannot remember a single detail, only the acid on his tongue at his reaction to the semen. To the woman's worst nightmare. _

_Sarah Harris had lasted a month with him, but one day he comes in and the desk is bare again. When he walks to Cragen's door and nods to it, Cragen gestures for him to sit and shut the door. _

"_She said she couldn't do it." Cragen sighs, not looking at him for a minute before their eyes meet. "She didn't give any more reason than that. You know why?"_

_He shakes his head, though he knows it must be something to do with him. His thoughts do not care enough to think it through, to analyse it all. What would be the point? She's gone. _

"_We've got another woman coming in. She's older, been in Vice for years. Again, if you want to swap with one of the others...." The sentence trails off as Elliot shakes his head. He doesn't. She lasts till the end, till he leaves himself, till that day._

He wondered for a second what had happened to her, before he realised that he didn't want to know. He didn't want his brain to inhabit the graveyard of cops. There were too many people there without him disturbing them.

"What is there on this guy? That Fin's bringing?"

He broke the silence, needing information as the time came closer, needing to be prepared. For what, he didn't know, but it was part of the journey, he could feel it.

"He's 32. Ex structural engineer. The name on his I.D was David Lewis but his actual name is Daniel Hartman. No record, but we've managed to track down the company he used to work for." She looked straight at him for the first time, once they had become cop to cop, detective to detective. "They said he was quiet, generally a good worker but didn't cope with stress or failure very well. He left the job when his wife ran off with another man."

He digested the information. His guilt was becoming clear, five years ghostly mist disappating before his eyes. The DNA didn't lie, blood tests and semen didn't lie, but it wasn't guilt they were trying to prove. He needed more.

It still felt too easy though. The psychological profile he was forming without the need for Huang or any other shrink, it so clearly told the story of this guy. Control and loss of it. Failure and rage. He choked down how much he knew those worlds.

There had to be something else, something more, some huge cover-up that had stolen Olivia. Something meaningful. It couldn't, dare not be as simple as your garden variety control freak turned rapist. Turned killer.

Silence hung, waiting for it's predator to strike. But when it came, he was stunned, as shocked as he had been through the tumultuous hours he had already made it through. Hearing the voice, he looked up and saw Munch in the doorway of the room.

A shockwave of past, of deja vu hit him, and they stared at each other for a second and an age before he went over to hug him, holding each other hard and with an aura of emotion swirling around.

"God it's good to see you." Elliot was surprised to hear the truth in his voice, how real the knowledge that he had missed seeing the older man so often. He hadn't thought he could feel such things any more.

Still, it felt so strange, so bitterly odd to see Munch in the squad room again, looking as he did. They hadn't lost touch, El had seen him a few times in the intervening years, but never in a precinct, as a detective. Not since Munch's last day.

_He never saw it happen but he heard it, and he saw the perp afterwards. He's sitting at his desk working on paperwork, his partner across from him doing the same. He is vaguely aware that Fin and Munch have a suspect in interrogation: someone they have been hunting for date rape, for using excessive numbers of roofies so the girls can hardly function for days afterwards, much less remember what happens. But it means nothing to him. He has nothing to add. _

_Suddenly, a crash hits the room, and yelling fills the hallways. Cragen dives out of his office and Elliot finds himself running towards the interrogation room before he can think._

_Fin is trying to pull John off a man lying on the floor, but he is not succeeding. John looks possessed, out of control, frantic. Elliot has never seen him use such violence before, fight so ferociously, a terrier with a rat, but he and Cragen both go in, and with three of them they get him out of the room._

_As soon as the door slams behind them, he changes again. A chilling calm seems to fall over him and he stops fighting, stops struggling against them. The fire dies. _

"_I'm done. That's it. I quit." An man says those words, but it's not John. Not the John they know though. This is a man who is closing a door. _

"_Get Fin to pack my stuff up. Here's my badge." He hands it to Cragen who is stunned, without words. _

"_My gun is in the top drawer of my desk."_

_And with that, with nothing more, he walks out. Cragen doesn't move but Elliot goes after him, grabbing his arm just after he walks out of the door. _

"_What's going on?" He tries to pull him round, to make him look at him, to get an explanation, but Munch shrugs him off and keeps on walking, as if Elliot doesn't exist. Elliot keeps at him until they are half way down the stairs, before his emotions are exhausted and he stops._

_John doesn't say a word. Just leaves. _

_Over the next few weeks they try his apartment, his phone, anywhere they can think to look, but none of them see him. It isn't until two months after he walked out that Fin comes in and says he's met John for a drink, that he's doing better, that he's seeing a counsellor. That that day had been a choice of murder, suicide or resignation._

A year after he left, everyone received a card with an announcement and a photo. He'd moved to Boston, and got married again. Fifth time lucky, the card read, her signature neat beside his scrawl. They looked happy. Elliot wondered what Fin, what Don, what everyone must have made when they received that, but he never asked. He knew himself that he didn't begrudge John a second chance. That Olivia would be so happy for him. That it was only right that some good could come out of it.

Still, he had to remove the card and picture from the trash can three times over the next few days. It now sat in the box at the bottom of the closet. Sometimes he thought he was keeping it to show her.

"You didn't have to come."

John gave him a look. Yes, I did, it read. Of course I did. Even though I said I wouldn't. They could still read each other.

"You in town on your own?" John nodded.

"Rebecca will fly down, if...." But even he didn't seem to be able to find words. Elliot tried to find the ending in his head. If what. If John needed support. Comfort. Companionship. If they find a body. An answer. If...if...if with no end in sight.

John pulled out his wallet and handed Elliot a picture. It was of Rebecca and a toddler. John's son. John had a son. It still staggered him. Aaron Oliver Munch. He was so glad when it wasn't a daughter. He couldn't bear another Olivia. Even 'Oliver' tore into him, but he could recognise it as the tribute it was.

But tributes were for the dead.

It was all coming together then. Don and Alex sat in grief upstairs. John in front of him with a new life in his hands, a life that Olivia hadn't touched at all. Fin on his way back.

And him. Back here. After the day when no one thought he would last twenty-four hours. The day the sky fell in on him.


	10. Chapter 10 Leaving

The room was filling up, with air of the past and of the new. Elliot watched, leaning back in a chair and still hovering above them all in his mind. It struck him, as familiar faces surrounded him, clung together in a wall of memory, that it was as if someone had taken a scene from years ago and moved things around to play spot the difference. It was even possible to do so with the sounds, John's voice one minute, a strange one the next. Jarring and comforting in equal measure, he could close his eyes and make five years drift away, dragged out by the tide. But then they came back to hit him with reassuring pain, washed over him with frozen life, reminded him of reality.

John had commandeered his old desk and Don and Alex sat near him. Both had real smiles on their faces when they saw John. True signs of happiness were few and far between now, fading after the initial joy, but pleasure at his presence lingered. He was the one that had come through best, that had changed the most. That had found a new life, not stayed suspended in a half one.

News had leaked throughout the streets and precincts, and not only were there officials from 1 P.P there but Monique Jefferies had come in about twenty minutes after John, Brian Cassidy not long after that, bringing with them sodden melancholy and stilted smiles, as well as the comfort of a old sweater dug from the closet, that smelled of the past.

They all sat or stood around, drinking coffee, while younger, newer detectives got on with work at desks. It was like playing hooky from school, sitting with old friends, memories circling like prey.

Capt. Price came out of her office and surveyed the group without comment or introduction to those she hadn't met, simply saying that Fin had called again and they were just outside the city.

Elliot felt the tension swell, rising to cover them, but not only that. Reminiscence began, pulling memories close to their skin as protection. Being there, almost together, caused stories to swarm from them, and they talked with voices that began quiet but rose to sound almost normal.

Looking across at Cassidy, he idly wondered if he had ever told anyone else that he slept with her. If anyone else knew that he had an entirely different reason for being here and for feeling her loss. If in a drunken night he poured it out in bitterness and grief. Somehow, he couldn't see Brian doing that. He'd cared too much about Liv to do so. He suspected that he did as Elliot did, carried their own secrets of her within their hearts. To let them out would be to lose another part of her to the passing of time.

Elliot was aware he had the most stories to tell, especially of Olivia, but he couldn't bring himself to share many, simply interjecting with small details. The full stories, the full images of her were his, to have and to hold.

Part of him was angry with them, to hear the past tense when they refer to her. Already they were memorialising her, writing her eulogy and the words inscribed in stone for all to see, that couldn't change. He wanted to scream that they should at least wait until she was confirmed dead, until they had a confession or a body, but he didn't.

The other half of him was so glad to be able to hear her name, to wallow in her and her life and see her grow before his eyes, made vivid with the words and love of others. It was easy to quietly pretend that she was just out getting coffee and would walk back in on their inane chatter. To drown in memories.

It struck him as bitingly ironic that the reason they were all there was to find answers, was the fact her 'taker' would soon be there, and yet it was the strongest he'd felt her in a long time. The closest to her he'd got.

He thought about her visits in his dreams. The way he loved and hated them in equal measure, clung to them and would wake with tears in his eyes. The way his heart still leapt when he thought he saw her in the distance and even when it was proven that it wasn't, he would let himself drift for a second into 'what if'. He couldn't help but wonder what would happen once escape was ripped from him.

Looking at the other, strange detectives around them, listening in, watching their talk, he considered what they saw. How did they appear, from the outside of the glass that contained them, that kept them trapped together? He didn't want to be free though. Free meant something else. Free meant not have an excuse any more.

He wondered whether the people watching wanted a part of the camaraderie. Or the success rate they had by being such good partners. Whether Olivia's disappearance so tainted their record that they feared something would rub off on them. It was just one of the many sadnesses, that Olivia and Elliot would now not be remembered for the good they did, but for a missing person and a broken man. People dissolving into nothing.

She had never faded in his mind, and he knew that if someone needed him too, he could describe her down to the last wrinkle of her face when she smiled, the movement of her hand as she brushed her hair from her face. The sound of her sigh.

No one needed that of him though.

His thoughts turned to what they were going to do afterwards. When he had done the grieving and the laying to rest and the closure. What came after the waiting? Forgiveness? Resolution? Going back to being a husband and a father?

Thinking of Kathy over the years, watching him, was hard. They'd balanced on a tightrope, and in the detached part of his mind he knew it had been as hard for her as for him. To watch someone disintegrate. Sometimes they slept in the same bed, sometimes he was in the spare room. Sometimes he was on the couch, a blanket always thrown over him by morning, the children tiptoeing around him. Sometimes he talked about her as easily as if she were in the next room, other times she was blocked from their lips and their lives.

Looking around, it was staggering to see all the people that had never come back, only to sit in the room now, weaving strength between them. How impossible it had seemed for any of them to set foot in the building again. Even him. Perhaps especially him.

_He's pressing on her as hard as he can when he feels her take a last breath. He doesn't want to hurt her, hates that he's inflicted more pain by pushing on the open wound but he's trying desperately to keep her alive. But even as he does so, he knows that it is pointless. There is too much blood, too much life leaving her and he feels that, as he brings agony to her last breath. She's dead at least four minutes before the bus arrives. _

_As he watches the paramedics shake their heads, the crime tape go up, the sheet go over her body, he is entirely numb, not moving. People walk around him, brush against him, but come nowhere near, not making it through his midnight grief. _

_It feels like nothing matters really. Not why she died, not whose to blame, not who needs to be held responsible. Nothing. For the first time in his life, he doesn't want to find the answers, not because __he fears them but simply because he doesn't care. _

_After too many lost minutes, someone is guiding him towards a car, putting him in, slamming the door. It isn't until they get back to the precinct that he realises it's Fin that's driving, giving him a concerned look as he stops. He manages to get out of the car and go in himself though. He doesn't check in with anyone, or tell the night's story. He stays silent. _

_Her blood coats his hands and he can feel them stiffening as it dries, rigour setting in. In an attempt to stop the choking round his neck, he turns the bench in the locker room over, hitting the metal of the lockers as he has done before, but then he sees it isn't his he has deformed, but hers, scarring it's surface. New name, new belongings, but hers still. It will never be anything else. _

_All it has done is added more blood. He tries to rub, stroke, caress away the dent caused by his fists, but it won't budge. He needs it off, needs the blood gone. He thinks about how many tears it would take to wash it all away._

_After an hour, Cragen comes looking for him. Don can hear the shower going but there are no clothes laid out, and the overturned bench tells a story of its own. He calls Elliot's name, but there is no reply._

_The shower is cold, he can feel it as soon as he comes near. Elliot is sitting, back to the tiles, his suit still on, his shoes shining in the water. He is looking at his hands, and when Don looks as well, he can see that they are red raw, palms held upwards in a plea. Elliot is trembling, but Don is certain he doesn't know it. _

_When he reaches out and turns the water off, the freezing stream dying down before stopping completely, there is no reaction. He says his name once, twice, but he is talking to an empty space._

_Ignoring the damp that immediately eases through his pants and his back, he sighs as he sits down next to Elliot. They look at nothing, at Elliot's hands, at droplets easing their way down the tiles towards oblivion._

"_I was too late."_

_It's fifteen minutes of sitting in the silence of stones before Elliot utters these words, and he sounds like a child to Cragen. Like he's looking for affirmation of his guilt, or of the facts. Don nods his confirmation. _

"_Yes."_

_He can still feel Elliot tremble next to him, but doesn't look at him. Simply sits and listens to the words come from the loss and the shadows. _

"_There was nothing I could do." _

_He knows the feeling. There is nothing he can do now but answer with the truth as he feels it now, wrapped as they are in brokenness and grief._

"_There never was." _

_They're no longer talking about the girl. Were they ever? _

"_Why?"_

_The question hangs before them, never ending. Don wants to simply shrug but he knows that Elliot isn't aware enough of his surroundings to feel or see it. _

"_I don't know." _

"_What's the point?"_

_What a question, Don thinks. How can he give an answer to something he has asked every day since his wife died. His own grief heightens as the knowledge of what Elliot is feeling runs through his veins. He knows this place, desolate and empty, and he wishes he didn't. _

"_I don't know."_

_Elliot seems to let a hard breath go before he speaks again. _

"_You're speaking the truth now." It's a hollow fact._

"_Yes."_

"_She's never coming back." It's the first time Elliot has said it, even to himself. Silence hangs in the air as both wait for the answer to that question. Except, it's simply a statement. "Is this what it's going to be like now?"_

_Don repeats his affirmation. _

"_Yes." It hangs, sodden and heavy with failure and resignation, drowning them. _

_They sit until Elliot's trembling has gone past cold and into a pleasant numbness. They count lines on skin and mortar between tiles. They chase water droplets with their eyes. Elliot expects each heart beat to be his last. He has to think through every breath. He knows if he doesn't, his body will simply stop. It's such a fight. How do you fight when you don't know what you want to win? Then, he dreads knowing. It either means he's ready to die or he's ready to live again. He doesn't want either. _

_He watches the tears streaming down the wall's face. He wonders why it cries, who it has lost. They wait for hours in the cold and the pain for answers. None come. _

_Suddenly he snorts some laughter. What she would say now if she came in and saw them sitting in a freezing shower, soaked through to the core and wallowing in dirty, stained water. They chuckle, joined in the image of her, the expression on her face. He sees her coming in; the roll of her eyes, her smirk, the concern that will backlight everything. She looks down with her arms folded and her hair tucked behind one ear, untouched by the water. They sit until she vanishes from the room, telling them that they really are mad and this is the first clear sign of insanity._

_He remembers a definition of insanity, that it is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. He wakes up over and over again, gets out of bed, and expects that the result will come and she will be found._

_It has to be insanity. _

_As dawn rises, he walks out of the building in a pair of jeans and an NYPD sweater. Without his __badge and without his gun. His suit is curled up in a ball in a trash can, ruined. It's the right place for it. Ghosts possess the precinct for him now, including the ghost of the men they used to be. Of _

_the man he used to be. _

_He never steps back into that building. Until then. _

Minutes moved by, and when he next blinked himself from the past and the stories, he was aware that the room was almost full, a combination of uniformed cops and detectives. Faintly, through an open window, he could hear the noise of the press outside, and there was a murmur building in the room. He couldn't help but be struck by how similar it was to the days just after her disappearance, when the room had been full and the love, desperation and need for her had infused them all. It was back, coating people that had never known her, and those that had known her best.

A noise came towards the room, a breeze of trepidation and adrenaline that lifted them all to their feet and turned them to look at the door as one. Never had he felt so contained in the strength of others, and so alone, as he waited for the man to come.

And then, he was there.


	11. Chapter 11 Questioning

The wall of uniforms and detectives parted, allowing him a closer glimpse of the man, head bowed and shoulders cowed. Despite being taller than Fin he looked small, and weak. Not the monster that Elliot had formed in his head, a scalding devil that had resulted in the loss of Olivia and the destruction of so many other people. He was just an ordinary man, and nausea rose in Elliot's throat, threatening to choke him. How easy it had been to lose her.

Fin had stopped at the doorway, waiting for Hartman to lift his head and see what he was up against, and when he did so, Elliot stared at him, willing him to look him in the eye. The man didn't though, his gaze sliding slow as ice melting over all those in front of him before dropping his head again. There was no reaction in his face.

When he moved out of sight towards the interrogation room, most of the people in the room seemed to exhale a sigh, a joint release of the threat they had been containing for him, but Elliot didn't. Instead, he felt drawn towards him, out of control, connected by an invisible thread that was dragging him onwards. Don and Capt. Price followed. There was never any suggestion that he wasn't going.

Looking through the glass, they saw Fin pushing him into the chair and taking the handcuffs off, before settling down in the seat opposite. Elliot was stood between the two captains, ex and current, supported. Or contained. Another man he had never seen joined them, walking into the interrogation room and leaning against the wall. Elliot was struck by how cold he felt, surrounded by people. Alone.

"Fin's partner, Paul Thomas," Capt. Price said, nodding at the man through the glass.

The scene in front of him, the two detectives and the suspect, was one that Elliot knew he and Liv had played out many many times before, and one he had seen in his nightmares. It ached with familiarity but never had he felt so out of control, standing on the outside looking in as his future was decided in the room before him. Answers or silence. Sink or swim. Live or die.

"So, you know why you're here?" Fin leant back in his chair, analysing the man. Hartman shook his head, looking down at his hands on the table.

"Well, why don't we start with your name. David is it, or Daniel?" There was a taste of sarcasm in his voice.

"Daniel." He spoke so quietly that those standing and watching strained to hear.

"What's with the fake I.D Daniel?" Fin tossed onto the table the driving license that had been found on him. It skidded to a halt but Hartman didn't look at it, instead just shrugging.

"Trying to escape from something? Hide something?" He shrugged again, but Elliot could see a tightening of his shoulders, even from outside, which was accentuated when Fin's partner, Paul, jutted in from his position leaning against the wall.

"What would this guy have to hide, looks pretty harmless to me. Pathetic really." Fin snorted quietly at the statement, watching for a reaction.

"You married Daniel?" He shook his head and looked up, first at Fin and then Paul before speaking.

"No." His voice was low, but louder than when he had stated his name.

"But you were married, weren't you. When was that?" Fin's tone was mildly condescending, coated with a light-heartedness as if his questions meant nothing, a simple teasing. Elliot wondered if the man could feel the weight behind the words, the pressure of five years pressing down on them. He thought not.

"A while ago." Still leaning back, he was looking somewhat warily at Fin. Elliot could feel every question tensing his own muscles minutely. He knew this was the game they played, but it felt excruciating, the tiptoeing, the circling before the kill.

"Let's see, I've heard that your wife left you almost six years ago. That sound about right?" Fin tapped the file sitting in front of him.

"Yeah, I guess." Hartman shifted in his chair, the metal against the floor screaming slightly.

"Why'd she leave, Daniel?" He shrugged yet again and Fin continued, "no ideas?" The question hung between them for a second while Hartman squirmed before finally answering.

"Guess she didn't love me."

"We heard she left to be with another man," Paul interjected, a sneer in his tone. Their suspect didn't reply, but the muscle tensed through his locked jaw at the disdain.

"That what happened?" Fin asked, and part of Elliot wanted to smirk, seeing the man feel uncomfortable. The other half was impatient already, struggling, desperate to be allowed in to beat the answers out of him. Paul spoke again,

"Aww, who'd have thought it. How could anyone desert this poor guy, run off with a better man. Doesn't seem possible." There was little reaction.

"What happened after she left?" Fin asked. Hartman simply continued the shrugging, and Fin flicked open his notebook and looked down. "Says you left your job just after." He nodded but didn't speak. "Why?"

"Guess I didn't want to do it any more." He looked down, almost mimicking the tiredness of a man weary with his life and the choices he made.

"So, then what did you do?" Fin leant in and waited for an answer. None came, Hartman not even acknowledging the question and outside, Elliot turned away for a second before looking back. Finding answers, digging for them, demanding them, was part of the job, and yet in that moment he hated it with such intense passion he could barely breathe.

He felt both people beside him look his way for a second, and Don's concern washed over in a wave, but he was already focused back on the scripts being read in front of him. It was unreal, false, and yet someone had taken bricks from the wall he had constructed around him, and now the world was coming in. Reality. It hurt.

"You had any girlfriends since your wife? One night stands? Play around a little?" That got a reaction and he glanced quickly at both men in turn before flushing slightly and picking at the skin of his fingernails. "Anything you want to tell us?" Fin probed, but he shook his head.

"Come on, surely you've got something you want to brag about? A gorgeous girl who couldn't resist you?" Paul sounded more genuine in that statement, and Hartman looked up slightly as if unsure as to his motives, before returning to his hands.

"Or did no woman want to touch you," Fin asked, it coming out as more a statement of fact than a query, saturated in disdain and disgust. Elliot resisted the urge to punch through the glass, just to release some tension.

Fin opened the folder lying on the table and pulled the top picture out, pushing it towards him.

"Do you recognise her?" Hartman looked down at the picture for a second before turning his head away, as if he didn't want to see. "Well?" Fin leant forward and shoved the picture closer, but Hartman refused to look again as he shook his head.

"Well, that's funny, because your semen was found inside her," Paul's statement seared through the air, and they let it hang painfully over him while his jaw tightened and his whole body stiffened. "No comment?"

"What about this one?" Fin slid another photo towards him, and, slowly, as if he couldn't prevent himself, he glanced for a second before swallowing and looking away again. "Don't recognise her?"

"Let me guess, no comment," Paul sneered, and turned towards Fin "Isn't that funny, cos, surprise surprise, his semen was inside her as well."

Those outside watched intently as the man continued to look awkward, not admitting anything but not claiming innocence either. They could see each swallow slide down his throat, sweat silently beginning to dot his face, and Elliot felt the same happening to him as tension rose around them.

They went through the same act with the third girl, the showing of the picture, the looking away, the heightening of anxiety visible on his body and easy to feel by those watching. Elliot wondered for a second if he was still breathing, before getting drawn back in.

"So, you're claiming that you don't remember any of these girls." Fin asked. No response.

"You know, you'd think you'd remember if you'd raped all three of them," Paul started moving round the room, walking behind him and leaning in to get closer, murmuring over his shoulder, "see, they all tell exactly the same story. That a man broke into their apartments, threatened them with a knife, raped them, and left." He stood back up, seemingly enjoying the body language of the guy in front of him, the resumption of nervous hand movements, picking at his nails and skin. Fin continued where Paul left off.

"And then, surprise surprise, when we did forensic tests, all the 'samples' that were left were identical. And, when your DNA got ran, we got a match." There was a note of triumph in his voice that everyone but the suspect could tell was false. Hartman obviously didn't though, swallowing again, a wet sound.

"So, is there anything you'd like to say?" Paul demanded, but despite the clear anxiety being show, Hartman sat in silence for long, hateful minutes, until he jumped as Fin stood up. He slammed his hand down on the table and, with a glare of revulsion that could be felt by those outside, walked out of the room, the wall shuddering as the door crashed shut behind him.

"What do you want us to do?" he asked, looking at all three of them in turn and then staring through the mirror as his partner prowled around the room without speaking, "keep grilling? Leave him to sweat a bit more?"

Capt. Price stopped watching the movement beside them and leant slightly against the mirror, taking in the men before her, composure clear in every movement.

"We could do with him admitting to the rapes before we try and find out about...." her voice stalled for a second and it struck Elliot as surprising that she, who hadn't known or been affected by Liv, failed to bluntly state her name, "then he can't back out of the DNA results, and his blood being found in her apartment."

"Do we need a confession?" Cragen asked, and Elliot wanted to hit him for a second. How could he contemplate not getting the answers. But, at the same time, he understood. This was the most sublime form of torture known to man, the drip drip drip of answers with no information, and secrets hidden in shadows, out of reach.

"Not for the rapes." All of them turned in sync to see Alex standing in the doorway. She nodded to Capt. Price. "Your ADA called, said she's tied up in court, asked me to advise you if I could. Even though I'm no longer..." The sentence faded away, as so many often did, and Elliot saw her visibly steel herself before continuing.

"The DNA evidence is strong and indisputable for them, and the statute of limitations doesn't come into it as, after Olivia went missing, Donnelly issued an arrest warrant based on his DNA profile, which wiped out the statute time," and as she spoke, Elliot couldn't help but recall with something close to pride how everyone had pulled together in those days.

She continued, "add to that the CCTV footage of him following one of the victims and a jury would be insane not to convict. But for Liv...." And there it was, that dissipation of words again, facts to unbearable to be released into the air. Elliot thought he might choke when he tried to speak, but managed to get the statement out nonetheless.

"What do you mean. His blood was there, in her apartment!"

"Yes, but not very much. And we don't know what to charge him with,"and there was pain circulating throughout them all as she touched home truths that had been avoided for years, open wounds that had been ignored. "We could charge him with murder but we have no body, no semen or evidence to charge him with rape, not enough blood to say she wouldn't have survived, and no evidence to say that he did kill her."

She managed to speak without letting her emotion drown her, but Elliot could feel it emanating from her, and he knew those who knew her could feel it too. "We've got nothing. We need a confession to find out what happened."

She turned and assessed the suspect through the glass as he sat biting his nails, silently watched by Paul and another uniformed officer, scowls and violence issuing from them.

"If things get bad, you might be able to offer him a deal. A reduced sentence for the rapes if he tells you what happened to Olivia. But we have to get him to compromise himself more before we can do that. He hasn't got anything to gain by accepting a deal at the moment, because there is only circumstantial evidence. You have to get him to talk." She sounded hollow as she spoke, her words empty, and she didn't look at them again before turning away and leaving.

"Let's leave him to sweat." Don said, and walked out. Capt. Price stood beside Elliot for a few more seconds and then took a couple of steps towards the door. When he didn't follow, she turned back to him.

"We'll get him." She said quietly. He looked at her, but didn't agree or disagree. "You coming?" He wanted to watch him, to study him, to burrow into his mind and force the information out through willpower alone but it was beyond him to control himself for much longer. He left, as he knew he should.

Going back into the squad room, into the hustle and bustle of the ordinary world, he was struck with the intense desire to run. Olivia's picture was back on the screen, her and her life being studied again, and the pain of such a violation still hit him. He had thought about this day so many times, and yet the reality was ten times worse than his nightmares. The scab ripped off the wound that has festered, and acid poured in. He sat down, lowered his head in his hands, and thought of escape, to the place he could run to and leave this all behind.

_It's nine weeks after she has gone, and he stands outside her apartment building in the sunshine, waiting to speak to the landlord. It feels wrong, when he looks around him, to see people walking with smiles on their faces and laughter in the air. He wants to hide in the shadows and block out the world, lurk in the darkness that rests across him so easily. _

_When the landlord lets him in, he does so with hardly a word, quietly giving the key and leaving him to it. The door shuts with a gentle click, and he closes his eyes. There is a sense of her still, the scent of her place, like she'll step out of a room and greet him at any minute. He waits, but no sound comes, and when the beat of his heart becomes unbearable to hear, he moves. _

_The forensic team have cleared up after themselves and it looks undisturbed and unexceptional. But, as he walks through, trailing his fingers over the surfaces and sitting on the bed, there is an echo that hangs, a faint aura of dust that covers not only furniture, but his memories and her within them. He sits until the must fades and she comes to the fore, until he can forget for a split second that she won't come bursting through the door and look confused at his presence. When he gains that moment, it is bliss. He breaks all over again when it shatters, and the spell is gone. _

_Then he does what he came to do, taking food out of the cupboards, unplugging the electronics, tidying. He takes her spare gun from where it is locked up and slips it into his belt. The license swapped to him yesterday. He will not sell it. He cleans impeccably, makes sure all the blood is gone. When he looks around, he wants it to be as she left it, only better. A place where she will sigh with relief when she walks through the door. Her home. _

_He wants to stay for hours, forever, but he doesn't, instead picking up the paperwork given to him by the landlord and the box of a few things he has selected. As he leaves, he carefully locking the door behind him. Safe. _

_It's the weekend, and he has arranged to meet Don, Fin and Munch at a local café. They sit, drink coffee in silence, and he slides them each a key across the table. He had been going to pay the rent by himself, but the others had insisted they split it between them when Fin overheard him on the phone to the landlord. They each attach the key to their key-rings, where it hangs as innocently as the others. _

_For a second he wonders how long the apartment will sit empty, whether one by one they will fall by the wayside until he is the only one left who visits and pays. But in that moment, he knows they won't. They will hold on for as long as it takes. Until there is an answer. Or she comes back. _

_When he gets home, he takes the worn, fuzzy bear he has removed from her bedroom out and places it on his bedside table. He knows he's crazy, but he couldn't let it sit there in the emptiness any more. It's a sign of how accepted his insanity has become when neither Kathy, nor the kids, even blink when they discover it. On occasion, when he wakes up on the sofa or in the spare room, he finds the bear next to him. He never asks who brings it to him, and no one ever says. _

_Over the years, every couple of months, without question, he comes and cleans, opens windows for an afternoon and freshens the place, brings life back. There are always signs that the others do so as well, and sometimes the children ask to come with him. Occasionally he lets them, and they spend warm silent hours preparing the apartment. On the way home, they talk of her, of their memories, but never in that place. The apartment is for her living, not for remembrance as if at a grave. _

_When he sits there, in the quiet and the solitude, he always comes away with hope. Hope that she will fill the rooms again, that she will stand at the counter and look at him, her hands wrapped round coffee. He walks around and sees her everywhere, a flash of light hitting her hair, her laughter welling up around him, and every time he leaves he thinks that the next time he comes in, he'll be bringing her home. _

_There is no reason for this, no explanation other than she feels so real to him there, it allows him the perfect escape from reality. It is the one place for him to truly believe she is still alive. Its a place where he can feel that freely, without anyone else looking at him and thinking he's insane, or deluded. _

Seeing her face on the screen again, the urge to run there was almost unbearable.

Instead, he stayed still, and John stood beside him as they watched Fin pace the room, his new partner talking to him from his seat at John's old desk. He knew they were speaking loud enough for him to hear but their voices was pushing through treacle and never reached him.

"Why couldn't this have been one of your conspiracies?" He asked John, who looked at him with a knowing smile that made him, just for a second, want to yell.

He himself, without John's help or 'out there' rantings, had gone through all the extreme alternatives, nagging and tormenting Huang and Cragen for information, asking Alex to find out whether it was witness protection. The obsession consumed him for a good few weeks before he suddenly let it drop when he realised there were no new leads and Cragen shouted bitterly at him in his office. He could still recite the words perfectly.

"Do you really think that there would have been so much publicity, so much money spent on searching for her, so many man hours and forensics and cost, if she was in witness protection, or had been whisked away by the FBI. Stop being a coward Elliot, and face it."

He had sat for an hour and at least three shots of vodka after Cragen's words, who had then had to drive him home.

"What I wouldn't have done for it to be one," John said. "The thought that....that this guy could...." he nodded towards the invisible interrogation room, "I don't know how you can watch." Elliot shrugged.

"It's not a choice."

They both looked up as Fin stormed over to them, anger written across his face and pulsing from every cell of his body.

"Fuck man."

Elliot glanced behind him and saw his new partner, Paul, standing with resignation on his face. He gave Elliot a small nod before looking away.

"How the hell do we do this?" Appealing to them both for an answer, neither could think of either platitudes or soothing words to give. "I just want to kill him. But I can't. And he's sitting there and he won't fucking talk and I have to play this game with him to make him give it up. And I just want to kill him." He was almost yelling by the end, his hands leaping into the air with hate.

Elliot knew that feeling, and John seemed to as well, getting up and putting his arm around Fin's shoulders.

"We've done it for so long. All we've got to do is get through this. And if I can't be in there, you're the guy to do it." Fin glared at him for a second before relenting and sighing, John's quiet words ad gentle attempt at humour somehow seeming to soothe.

While they began to talk new tactics, focusing on the simple task in front of them rather than what it might bring, Elliot found himself glancing behind the two men, just for a second wishing her to walk through the doorway and end it a better way. So that none of them would have to do this any more.

Shaking his head, he knew it was dangerous ground he was stepping on, and instead thought about a conversation he'd had about two years ago with Fin, meeting up for a beer and a chat. Where that same question had come up. How the hell did they do it.

_It's a shady bar, the kind where business men come to avoid their wives and professional drinkers to avoid their lives. Not much light ventures into the gloom, even in the late afternoon of summer, and it's the perfect place. _

"_How you doing?" Fin asks, sliding a beer towards Elliot and settling down across from him with one of his own. When he saw Fin walk in, he was struck by the fact it was nearly a year since they had seen each other, and Fin had changed, though not by much. Showing another year of life as a cop perhaps, that put five years on them that no one else carries. He shrugs, and takes a sip. There doesn't seem to be an answer. _

"_You?" There comes the same shrug from Fin. _

"_Ya know." Yeah, I do, he thinks, and yet I don't at all. You still function, still do your job, still sit in that room. I don't know how you're doing at all. But he doesn't say any of it. _

"_How's work. And your new partner?"_

_They talk through inanities for a while, never mentioning Fin's cases, instead deciding that his new partner, Paul, is okay but not a patch on John. They even decide that life seems boring without aliens abducting JFK, and the latest political scandal not involving everyone from the CIA to Columbian drug barons. Elliot talks through the job he's been doing since he switched from Narcotics, which he had tried for six months or so after leaving SVU. _

_He's advising at the academy, teaching how to deal with possible sex crimes, how to spot a victim or a perp, warning signs and 'do's' and 'dont's'. Its mindless, easy and requires no dealing with victims. Mostly he's left alone, and it has been only twice that a wannabe has come up to ask about Olivia. The job even means he could be home at normal hours and he is, sometimes. _

_Mostly he'll drive for hours at a time, finding himself in the middle of nowhere in an attempt to lose himself, or sit in an all-night diner and drink bad coffee, listening to the chat of other lonely people drift over him. He's driven to Boston, Pittsburgh, once making it to St. Louis before turning back. He didn't know why, only that if she came back, he couldn't have left, have deserted her. She'd need him. _

"_You think anything is ever going to happen?" He doesn't need to spell out what he is asking. Fin eyes his bottle up, spinning it slowly in his hand and wiping the condensation from its surface before answering. _

"_I don't know man. I guess, I try and hold onto her as hard as I can, the Liv that we knew, and don't think about what might have happened. I don't want to think about it, until the day we know." He takes a sip, and sighs. "I have my slip-ups though."_

"_Like what?"_

"_Whenever I'm at a range, I imagine him. Perfect shot, every time." He snorts, and downs the rest of his beer in one before gesturing for more. _

_After a few more drinks, and fewer hours, El admits to how often he sleeps on the couch, and to talking to her as he drives. Fin admits to crying once, sitting on his son's sofa. He talks about how they now speak to one another, that his tears bridged a gap. A shaky bridge, that might fall down, but one that existed none the less. _

"_You gotta hold onto the good that you did. That Olivia did. There has to be a point to it all." A point, he thinks, and they get another beer. He doesn't remember anything after that. _

Now, as Capt. Price and Don came back over, as Paul joined them and they discussed the fact their suspect was pacing the room and seemed ever edgier, the idea of 'a point' rang viciously through his head. He hadn't found it yet, and he wondered if he ever would.

When they stood and went to embark upon round two, Elliot looked at John for a second, a gesture in his eyes. John shook his head. As he stepped back into that space, and watched Paul and Fin walk into the room, he wished he could decline as well.

"So, have we decided whether our overwhelming forensic evidence deserves a confession?" Fin said, pulling out a chair and slamming it down so hard Elliot was surprised the legs didn't break off, before sitting and staring at him. Paul continued his prowl. Hartman shifted in his seat, fear showing itself as sweat across his forehead.

"You know, it tends to go easier when you just admit it. People don't like it when you don't. Judges don't. Juries don't. Cops don't." Paul murmured over his shoulder, close to his ear. Hartman swallowed and looked as though he was about to talk, before shutting his mouth again.

Minutes passed, with pacing and hatred pouring off the two cops in waves, and Hartman shifting uncomfortably in the silence, trapped, with no escape. Elliot knew how that felt.

"I don't know why we're trying to help this guy," Fin said, standing up and picking up the folder in front of him, "let's just throw him to the wolves." Paul moved round so he was standing in front of him and smiled viciously.

"What a pleasure it will be to watch them destroy him."

Fin was half way through the door before he spoke.

"Okay....okay." Elliot's breath caught in his throat at the words. Fin and Paul turned to look at him, before both sitting down at the table.

"You got something you want to say?" Paul asked.

"Yeah," Hartman took a deep breath and looked down at his hands again before continuing, "I raped them."

"You raped Laura Hayden, Kirsty More and Joanna Lister."

"Yes. I... I broke into their apartments and waited for them. And then I raped them," there was almost a pleading in his voice as he said, "they deserved it. I was angry."

"Write it down."

The silence, the scratch of his pen against the paper and the sound of his breath were excruciating. The only sound from outside came once he had finished writing, and pushed it back towards the detectives. Capt. Price murmured under her breath,

"We've got him." But there was no triumph in her voice, and the words caused overwhelming nausea within Elliot. As the time crept ever closer, the urge to run grew. He couldn't understand how, after so long, the idea of resolution was so appalling, when it was what they had been waiting for for so many years.

Fin pushed the pad of paper towards Paul, and leaned back, assessing Hartman.

"What happens now?" He asked, looking between the two of them.

"Oh, we're not done yet."

Fin opened the folder in front of him again, and slid Olivia's photo out, looking at it for a second before turning it and pushing it towards him.

"What about her?"

He looked down at the picture, and even though Elliot couldn't see the photo clearly from where he was standing, he knew exactly what Hartman would be seeing, down to the tiniest detail.

"I don't know what you're talking about." He thought he could hear a tremor in Hartman's voice, but wasn't sure, doubting himself in the moment. Fin's voice became harsher, sandpaper across skin, drawing blood.

"You don't recognise her." A shake of the head, and then a reply.

"No."

"You've never seen her before in your life?" The coldness of Fin's tone settled across the room, and all outside might have been holding their breath for minutes at a time.

"No."

"Were you living in Manhattan five years ago?" Paul asked, and Hartman let go of a breath before answering, his expression showing his surprise at the slight change in questioning.

"Yes." There was caution in his tone.

"Did you have a TV?" He looked even more confused, but answered.

"Yes."

"Then how on earth have you never seen her?" Fin leant in with an accusing, questioning air, and his eyes flicked between the two of them before he looked away.

"Well, maybe I have." He seemed uncertain, and Elliot could see him take on the appearance of an animal trapped in the headlights. He wanted to pounce, to attack, to rip him to shreds, but he took another breath and waited.

"You remembering things then?" Paul asked.

"She's that cop that went missing." He looked at them both again, a faint trace of concern apparent in his voice, as if he was trying to get the right answer but wasn't quite sure what was expected of him.

"Yeah. You're right. You know anything about that?" Fin asked.

"No." His denial was fast, almost frantic, and Elliot could see him swallow.

"So it's just coincidence that you were seen outside her apartment a day after she went missing?" Hartman drew his arms across his chest as if to shield himself, protect him from where it was going.

"I guess."

"And it's also coincidence that your blood was found in her apartment? Along with her blood?" Elliot watched as the sucker punch landed on his face, and imagined him reeling away from the two detectives. Instead, he just went white, the blood seeping from his face as he stared, transfixed, at Olivia's photo. He seemed frozen in time. Paul spoke with an menacing air.

"Right now you're looking at 3 rape convictions, and the murder of a cop. That's life with no parole."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Hartman's voice was shaking, a mouse caught in the sights of a cat.

"So you don't know how on earth your blood happened to be in her apartment?" Paul sounded incredulous, like he didn't believe what he was hearing.

"No."

"Or how she went missing. Presumed dead. With your blood there?"

Hartman looked terrified, pushing his chair back from the table as if trying to get away from her photo, and the truth. He was shaking his head frantically, and Paul and Fin exchanged a look. Elliot couldn't breathe, couldn't bear it, and images flashed through his head, a million possibilities shown to him at once, each more devastating than the last. Before he knew what he was doing, the door had opened in his hand and he was walking towards the quivering wreck, ignoring all the sounds of restraint around him.

He stopped, not touching the man, just assessing him, and when he spoke, his voice sounded alien, the words coming from a different world.

"Just tell me what you did to her."


	12. Chapter 12 Neverending

The man's face was stone before him, frozen in shock, and within the roar of pain and rage surrounding him, Elliot felt hands pulling at his shoulders, his back, his arms, and voices around in a blur of frantic confusion. He tried to brush them off, wanting to home in on the man and the truth within his head, but as hard as he fought, he found bodies and strength in between him and his goal.

Tasting the fear, his instinct for the kill took over, and the room seemed tiny, with only him and his prey inside, despite the distant noise, yells and shouts, and his name echoing in the air, heavy with adrenaline and murderous rage.

With renewed franticness he clawed his way through those that stopped him, his body and muscles burning as he gave everything, but it was for nothing. In the moment his prey was blocked from his view, he became vaguely aware of there being uniforms, a solid wall of flesh and blood and the living. As hands pushed and pulled him away, his body seemed to collapse beneath him, and then they weren't holding him back but instead holding him up.

He was stumbling, hardly seeing or feeling the shadowy, indistinct ghosts surrounding him, and the next thing he heard was Don's voice coming through the mist. When the hands holding him let go he was surprised that he was able to keep his feet and, looking up, he found himself in the interview room, Don shutting the door behind them.

As it clicked to a close, Elliot turned slowly away, leaning on a chair and clenching his fists around it in preparation to break, to fight, to destroy, not with anyone but with himself. He knew, he knew, he knew that he had just jeopardized the most important case of his life, of all their lives, and he wanted to annihilate himself.

"Smash things if you want," Don's voice was terrifyingly calm, "but it won't make a difference." He wanted there to be anger, rage, recrimination launched at him but instead there was just the calm and the quiet and something close to pity. For a second his rage bubbled, and he could see the room destroyed in his mind's eye, hands ripped and bleeding, and the same understanding expression still on Don's face.

Instead, his legs gave way suddenly, muscles failing him, and he sunk to his knees, hitting the cold floor viciously. Sobs forced themselves out in agonising gasps, as the pain choked him, wrapping itself round his chest and his throat. He was kneeling as if praying, his arms clutched to his body to offer pitiful comfort, and a keening, crushing noise surrounded him.

It was running through his veins, oozing out of every cell and pore of his skin, his longing for her and his despair. It was the sound of a million years, a million losses, a primal pain that carried no words, nor needed them for it to be felt. He didn't know how he was breathing, he didn't want to be, he only knew that she was gone, and that man knew why and how, and none of it made any sense any more.

It was the moment they had been waiting for, the moment of truth, but despite everything happening as it should have done, they were no closer to her. And it didn't matter that they had caught him, that he had admitted to the rapes, that he was trapped in their walls, because she wasn't there. He wasn't saying, wasn't telling, and even his silence was worthless, because it wouldn't make any difference at all. She was still gone.

He rocked for more minutes than he thought possible, his mind no longer in the room but caught in the whirlpool of five years of pain, before he found his rocking slowing, and his cry fading from around him. Then there was just silence, and when he blinked and saw the world again, the sky was dark outside and the air black within.

Alex was stood at the doorway, her face turned away in gentle respect, but when she sensed him move she came over and offered a hand, lifting him from the floor and placing a mug of hot coffee in front of him as he sat down.

"What's going on?" Elliot asked, his voice coarse and foreign, and Alex sat down opposite him before answering.

"Nothing. He won't speak," she sighed, and sipped her own coffee without looking at him. It occurred to him that she was afraid, that he had finally crossed into insanity, and he wondered when the psychiatrists would come to take him to Bellevue. It felt like a blessed relief, if it was going to happen.

Alex continued on, "they're trying to get more information on him, where he's been living, what he's been doing, but they can't find anything. His car was stolen, his license was fake, he had a prepaid cell on him but there were no numbers stored. He seems to have made himself disappear."

Elliot took the information in but didn't react to it, instead watching himself pummel the man into the ground, seeing blood come from nose and mouth, his hand round his throat and choking him until he begged for mercy and said the words he needed to hear. But every time the daydream got to that point, it ended. He didn't know what words he wanted, what they would be, whether they would kill him inside, and faced with them being that close and yet so far away, his imagination refused to speculate.

They sat in silence for minutes at a time, Elliot terrifyingly numb to the world, his hands wrapped round the cooling coffee without moving. There was nothing in his mind. Nothing but dark spaces and the gut wrenching, choking grief that was lurking just out of sight. He wasn't aware when Alex stood and went to get more coffee, only realising when she replaced the cold in front of him with warm, and he felt the china faintly burn his skin as his hands rested round it again.

He didn't know how long it was before Don came back, only that two more untouched coffees have passed through his hands. Alex left, and Don sat down in his place, and Elliot found he couldn't bear to look up at him, fearful of the look in his eyes.

"They're not getting anywhere," he said quietly, the words hardly heard above the beat of Elliot's heart and his breath, "he won't say a word now. Seems like all the detectives in the building have tried." Elliot digested the information, the suspect's silence, before breaking his own.

"It's my fault," he said, sounding almost in wonder at his own stupidity, as if it had only just occurred to him.

"What is?" Don asked gently, trying not to break him.

"The guy...." and he gestured vaguely towards the interrogation room, "him not speaking." There was such a long silence following that declaration that Elliot felt sure there would be an acquiesce when the words finally came.

"It wasn't you Elliot," there was a wistfulness in Don's voice, almost as if he wished it could be that simple, "he's scared. Whatever happened, it happened to a cop, and he knows that with the rapes as well, that puts him in jail for a very long time. He doesn't want to brag, or confess, or show off. He's been hiding for five years. He's just scared."

It was the 'just' in Don's sentence that caused a tear to spill down Elliot's cheek again, one lone taste rather than the hot bitter flood that came with the sobs of pain before. They would never know, he wouldn't talk, 'just' because of fear.

He wondered if Olivia was scared, those moments in her apartment. If there had been time to realise what awfulness was coming, or if adrenaline had kept her going, kept fear at bay, blocked until...

"I'm scared too." He admitted, still not able to look the older man in the eye, and the agreement shattered yet another part of him.

"Me too."

They sat in the dark, lost and alone, with the light of the squad room casting bright lines across the floor that changed on the rare occasion someone walked by the door.

"I thought you'd call Huang. Have me put in Bellevue," Elliot admitted, moving his hands round the coffee for the first time in hours.

"Do you need to be there?" Don asked, and Elliot wondered what would happen if he said yes. How comfortable and easy it would be to lose himself in the madness, to be watched and contained and looked after, to not have to think or live any more. To be wrapped in cotton wool, with nothing getting through.

"No." He said. He knew he'd gone past that point now, the point where it could be fixed by simply locking himself up. It was ingrained, in his heart and his cells and every inch of his body. The truth, the bittersweet truth was that she had carried so much of him inside her, once she had gone, it had ripped too much of who he was away. He could only be nothing now.

So the night passed, broken only by the raised voice that Elliot could recognise as Paul Thomas, when he yelled frustration in the squad room and something smashed, glass raining down onto the ground. Neither of them moved, but Elliot's thoughts kicked into gear for a moment, allowing himself to feel distant surprise that the man who hadn't known Olivia, who hadn't been trapped in the web, could feel such rage. The voices soon faded though, and nothingness settled again.

It wasn't until sun began its gentle seep through the windows, and both men had counted each heartbeat a thousand times that Captain Price walked through the door, and they looked up in longforgotten hope, though what the hope was for, neither knew. She sat down with them, and for the moment it took her to steel herself to speak, Elliot thought how strange it was that she seemed like a detective, breaking news to loved ones. Then he realised that was exactly what she was.

"He's asked for a lawyer. We've got no choice but to hold him on the rape charges and go to arraignment. He's not going to speak."

At her words, and the stark knowledge that despite catching their man, it had all come to nothing, Elliot was shocked to discover he wasn't at all surprised at the turn of events. It felt like a hopeless dream, simply one of his never-ending nightmares, that he should be dragged from the sweet suspension of life and back into hell. That he should be forced to face the truth all over again, but for it to come to nothing, and their agony to continue.

Without looking at Don, he offered a hand to the Captain and thanked her before walking out of the room, though as he did so he couldn't help but wonder what he was thanking her for.

He saw that the room had emptied, and now there were just a few people around. Fin sat at his desk, head in his hands, but he stood up as he saw Elliot coming towards him. His head was bowed and his shoulders shrugged in defeat. Elliot got the feeling he was ashamed, and it broke him just a little bit more.

"I failed. I'm so sorry man."

The sight of Fin's destruction, his loss and the childish apology in his eyes nearly brought the tears again. Without thinking, he pulled him close, feeling the other man's shaking body as their chests collided. They stood for seconds that felt like hours, and Elliot could hear words around them but it wasn't for another few breaths that he realised it was him, murmuring as if soothing a child.

"It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault"

Round they went in circles and it was long long moments before they returned to the world and braced themselves against the pain. Elliot pulled away slightly and looked him in the eye before releasing completely, searching for an acceptance of his truth. John came closer, with Don beside, and they stood together, hands on each others shoulders, equals in their sorrow and grief. For a second he saw Olivia smile at them, at their companionship and their love, and as he gazed at her, he heard, as if coming from far away, Don say,

"The last thing she'd want is for us to break now."

At the heartbreaking truth, he felt tears well for a second in his eyes before blinking, and around him he felt them all take a breath. His body joined in without question, and he settled back with the ground solid beneath his feet. As they let go of each other, Alex came up and hugged each in turn.

"We'll keep trying," she said, gesturing to the current SVU ADA standing behind her with undisguised sadness spread across her.

He looked at her before letting his gaze drift across the squad room, taking in details as if everything he remembered would be essential. Fin's partner, Paul, was typing up reports with exhaustion apparent, the coffee pot was newly filled, and Liv's picture was gone from the board again. The female detective, whose name Elliot couldn't even remember any more flashed him a sorrowful look as she walked past and sat down at Liv's desk, and he knew with a gentle, soft realisation that he would never belong in that room again.

Turning to Don, he said,

"Take me home." And both men walked out.

He was as unaware of the journey back out of Manhattan as he had been on the way in, but it came as no surprise when he felt the car slow and stop, and he saw his house sitting innocently next to them in the morning light. Don turned the engine off, and they sat in silence, each lost in his own world. Finally, Elliot went to get out of the car with slow, old movements, and as he did so, Don said,

"Take care of yourself El."

Looking back at his old captain, seeing age, tiredness and sorrow etched across his face, he nodded once.

"You too Cap." And with that he got out, shutting the door behind him and standing on the sidewalk for a moment, looking at his home.

Suddenly the front door was flung open with a bang and his son came charging out, arms spread wide and flying down the steps before launching himself into his arms, shouting

"Dad!" as he did so.

Elliot caught him, and buried his head in his hair, feeling his warmth and his heartbeat pressed against his chest, before Eli struggled free of the hug and dropped back to the ground. Looking up, he saw Kathy standing at the open door, and their eyes locked for a split moment before she walked back into the house.

He felt Eli's hand take his and drag him towards the door, excitedly talking and overflowing with energy and life. Elliot let himself be taken up the steps, heavy and tired and, without looking back at Don in the car still on the street, he closed the door behind him.


	13. Epilogue

_Epilogue_

_It's a clear spring day when they meet, on the fifteenth anniversary of their loss, buds peeking out of trees and a gentle coat of green slowly banishing the grey of winter. Elliot is first to the park, and sits in solitude on a bench, watching children run and shout in the brand new air, and feeling the beginning of warmth seep through his clothes and touch his skin._

_He closes his eyes and lets his mind wander through the events of the day so far. He has driven himself into the city and gone to her apartment, the only time he ventures into the mass of concrete and people now. It was as it had been left, as ever, but his visit to her had been shorter than sometimes, the place melancholy now instead of comforting. _

_Despite their efforts, and the lack of change, time has crept up as surely as it has captured each of them. Age shows in the fading of pictures and the brittle feel of the edge of books in the bedroom, and its been a long time since anything but junk mail arrived for her. As he stands and looks at the sunlight drifting across the floor, he indulges in his saddest comfort of all, calling her number and listening as the machine clicks in and her voice keeps him company. _

_He has often dreamed of moving in, sleeping in her bed, not changing anything but living his life contained in this one place, forgotten by the world, but he cannot, her worry and disdain of such an action preventing him. _

_Instead he has moved permanently into the spare room at home, and its a normal half life he leads. Only once has he heard any question being broached, and that by accident, as he stood at the top of the stairs and heard Lizzie's voice drifting up as she talked to Kathy._

"_Why do you stay Mom?" She asked, no accusation in her voice, but just curiousity. He listens with the same intrigue for the answer to come, but it is long moments before it does._

"_How can I leave?" And so they stay together, with companionable days and a kiss on the cheek as they go to bed in their seperate rooms. As far as he knows, that has been the only query to their living arrangements, although he thinks Eli must have spoken about it to Kathy, with his different perspective, never having known either Olivia, or his parents as a proper married couple. _

_Opening his eyes and bringing himself to the present, he sees John before John sees him, and watches him with his family, as he leans to kiss his wife on the cheek and ruffle his son's hair before handing him a soccer ball and watching them walk off together. Only then does he look up and see Elliot, and come to join him, and they hug before both sitting back down and beginning to talk of sons, the speed they grow and start their change to men. _

_Soon they are joined by Fin and Don, arriving together, and as Elliot watches them approach, he is again struck by the knowledge that Don is an old man now, though still surefooted and firm in his stride and his mind. Streaks of grey run through Fin's hair but he has aged well. Better than the rest of them, Elliot thinks. _

_After their greetings, they start to walk, the slow pace of reminiscence, and they talk of now and then. There is gentle teasing of Fin, now that he is Captain of Narcotics, having transferred back soon after the trial of Hartman. Soon though, there is a leaving behind of the present, and they drift back into the back, spinning stories about their deeds and accomplishments, tall tales full of the darkest humour and the lightest moments. _

_Every time they meet now, on that anniversary, always with the clear air of spring surrounding them, Elliot feels Olivia walking with them, smirking as they embellish and exaggerate, blushing at their gentle teasing of her, and the love that still coats her name when they speak it. _

_It takes maybe two hours before they lose the energy to tell the stories they've told a million times before, and this day is a quiet deja vu, repeated year after year now with the same words on their lips and uneasy comfort in each others presence. _

_When they arrive back at the place they met, they hold each other for moments before letting go with no words but only the truth seen in each others eyes, and promises are made to speak soon. Each sees the others in their own time, seperately, but this is the only day of the year they join together. And then they leave, seperately, down different paths. _

_Elliot watches as Fin and Don walk off together, knowing that Fin will have brought Don into the city and will deliver him home again, where Don will take him to a local diner for a meal. Don lives in a small house about an hour outside the city now, a place with a yard he keeps tended, and friendly neighbours he can enjoy his retirement with. _

_Every couple of months, Elliot and Kathy go out for the afternoon, sometimes bringing some of the family, sometimes on their own. Don and Kathy cook dinner together, Elliot sits and drinks a beer, watching them. And, come the evening, as they sit on the back porch and listen to Kathy pottering round the kitchen, leaving frozen meals in the freezer and cleaning up, they relive the past. Sometimes with words, sometimes not, and Elliot will catch glimpses of Liv beneath the trees, shadowed with starlight and watching them, before drifting away. He knows Don sees her too, sometimes. _

_Looking in the other direction, he sees John meet back up with his family, his son talking and gesturing as John takes his wife's hand and they disappear round the corner. He's glad John is happy, has found what he was searching for, and he knows Olivia is as well. _

_Then he begins to walk away himself, towards his car, where he will get in and drive to see his family at a park close to their home, his daughters and their husbands, Maureen's two daughters and Kathleen's son, Dickie's girlfriend and Lizzie who is a doctor and hasn't had time to find a partner yet, Eli who is sixteen and obsessed with nothing but football. _

_But as he walks, his gaze still takes in the people in the park, the children playing and the mothers watching, still looking, still searching for her, even as he feels her walk beside him. Always searching._

_

* * *

_

**A/N:**

**Okay: Firstly, thank you all for reading and responding so well to this. It means a lot.**

Secondly, this fic turned into something other than what I was expecting. Instead of resolution, I found that I couldn't stop thinking about what it would be like without answers, as so many people in real life have to face.

Thirdly, this ISN'T the end. I want to have my cake and eat it as well. There will be two sequels to this, each starting where chapter 12 leaves and ignoring the epilogue. I've had three distinct plot paths in my head all along, and now I've got to a point where I have to choose, I want to write all of them. So I will. Therefore, if you join me, you'll get two different endings as well.

Hopefully I'll see you there. The beginning chapters of both sequels will be posted soon. Thank you.  



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